At Requited, Daniel Green writes a very interesting review of We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. While definitely not being one of those MFA assassination pieces that have triggered such hot debate (I know that’s an exaggeration, but that’s how they’ve been referred and responded to) he […]
Scott Esposito tossed this softball up at Conversational Reading earlier and I feel compelled to join him in giving it a Baseball Furies swing because, wow, this is dumb! First of all, this reads like a teenager’s Facebook post/phone conversation transcribed to make a “literary” article, describing a novel: “ … by a writer who […]
You can never really say too much about Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Not that there isn’t a lot of pure BS and cliché written about Kafka by people who don’t have a clue why he is considered such an important writer – in fact, maybe that’s one more reason why an exhibition putting Kafka […]
I write about the American-European literary divide often enough, and just as often hear from people convinced that no such thing exists. Yesterday though another compelling piece of evidence that it does reached my inbox. It was the announcement of the winner of the Boston Review’s 2012 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Now I realize […]
The European Commission has come out with its list of translation grant recipients, otherwise known as “Strand 1.2.2 : Support for Literary Translations: selection results.” You can go to the official website and click on the link to a bunch of PDF charts and graphs that are about as unliterary as you can get, or […]
B O D Y A new Prague-based international literary magazine has just come out. B O D Y is run by editors Joshua Mensch, Christopher Crawford, Stephan Delbos and contains a selection of poetry, fiction and an essay on three neglected American women poets from the early 20th century by poet, writer and translator Richard […]
The structuralist notion of texts without authors is given a non-theoretical equivalent in ongoing Saudi book fair participation The recently held Seoul International Book Fair presented some new and upcoming translations of Czech writers, but another connection between the two distant countries is that the guest of honor in Seoul was the same controversial guest […]
The 2012 PEN Translation Fund Grants have been announced, with the work of two Central European writers among the final 12. A Hóhér Háza (The Hangman’s House) by Andrea Tompa, translated by Bernard Adams tells the story of a Hungarian-Romanian family living through the final two decades of Ceauşescu’s Romania. Tompa is president of the […]
A year spent in Prague is hardly an unusual experience these days for students, former students and all sorts of uncategorizable people in various phases of life. But the story of a South-American Indian spending a year in Prague back in 1908 presents a unique and fascinating story that seems as likely to come from […]
Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]
literalab 