Unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages. Three EU Literary Prize winners – the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal, Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski and Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, talk about the challenges facing writers from smaller languages […]
It is a cliché that can be applied to almost anything – “You don’t know what you’re missing.” And in all likelihood you really don’t know. Not anymore though, at least as it relates to Czech books. The linguistic iron curtain is being lifted. The Czech Literature Portal will have regular English-language updates on recently […]
The Franz Kafka Society’s publication of the first Czech translation of the correspondence of Erika Mitterer with Rainer Maria Rilke alerted me to the existence of a fascinating sounding writer. She was still a teenager when she corresponded with the great poet, published her own poetry collection at 24 and went on to write a […]
Part I: where American conservative Charles Murray’s scientific assessment of periods of cultural greatness is held up to a closer scrutiny than he would probably care for. The further Murray’s essay goes on, the more his conditions for cultural greatness fall into a deeper and deeper murkiness. At one point he sets up a hypothetical […]
Two Polish science fiction/fantasy stories have put their translators on the shortlist of the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards. Both were nominated in the short form category for individual stories. “Spellmaker” by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Michael Kandel for A Polish Book of Monsters anthology, which was reviewed here earlier this year. While […]
Where to look to discover new writers? At MFA programs, readings, literary magazines? Wrong. Israeli daily Haaretz tells the remarkable story of parking attendant turned writer Leonid Pekarovsky (or Russian art critic and intellectual turned parking lot attendant turned writer). Having emigrated from Kiev to Israel, Pekarovsky discovered that his intellectual pursuits back home meant […]
BookExpo America (BEA) starts June 2 in New York, with a fantastic looking ReadRussia program. Guests include Russian émigré writers and editors such as Marina Adamovich, Alexander Genis and Yuri Miloslavsky. Miloslavsky mentions the correspondence between Tsar Alexander I and Thomas Jefferson, something which would certainly cause Jefferson to lose any potential Tea Party support. […]
Czech author and publisher Martin Vopěnka was a guest at the Prague Writers’ Festival in 2012 and spoke to literalab about his path to becoming a writer, the influence of his studying physics on his most recent novel and his foray into children’s and young adult fiction in The Sleeping City. Read the full article […]
On the BBC’s “A Point of View” writer Will Self takes on readers and critics who oppose the use of difficult words, and by extension, of difficult art altogether. The main thrust of his critique is that educators, critics and the reading public are demanding that the bar be lowered from a level of reading […]
The Franz Kafka society announced today that this year’s Franz Kafka Prize goes to writer and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová. There were a few years where the Kafka Prize was seen as a golden globe-like preview of the Nobel Prize for literature after Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter won both in successive years. My guess […]
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