The story begins with a vain, preening, autocratic ruler of Russia willing to manipulate the forces of law and order to strike out against even the slightest traces of disloyalty. For him no charade of justice is too cruel or too absurd if it helps prevent dissension. Just such a sinister farce took place on […]
New books, uncertainty, a seminar and why writers should attend readings in their national folk costume There is a lot of new Bulgarian literature available at Three Percent in connection with the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel Contest run by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) and the America for Bulgarian Foundation. First of all, the 2010 winning […]
With evening falling and word of Václav Havel’s death already spread throughout the city, a line was forming in front of Prague’s Memorial of the student demonstrations of November 17th. Although the memorial itself is under cover people stood waiting outside under the winter’s first snow flurries to pay tribute to a man whose legacy […]
Slovakia’s Project Forum website Salon has an article by Polish novelist Michał Witkowski in which he gets at the situation in contemporary Poland by dividing European life into its Catholic and Protestant elements. Not being one or the other I have to take his word for it, but his choices seem right on and besides […]
The Fall 2011 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review is out and devoted to the former USSR. There is an excellent selection of essays, fiction and poetry some of which is available online. There is too much good stuff to single out anything, but a couple pieces worth noting are Jason Motlagh’s essay “Dark Days […]
I just wrote a review of Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery and one area that I thought could have been (but wasn’t) most interesting in the book was the constant interplay between fiction and fact, with secret services paying informants for documents copied from the pages of novels to capture conspirators likewise acting out the […]
The second installment of Peter Mendelsund’s series of essays on jacketing fiction is up, in which he asks whether designers “are, or should be, in the business of representing the underlying themes put forward by the works of fiction that we are charged with making jackets for.” There is a lot of Central and Eastern […]
Poland’s Museum of Literature has sent off two members of its staff in the footsteps of novelist Witold Gombrowicz on a journey from Warsaw to Buenos Aires. Not that these intrepid museum employees are planning to remain in Argentina for decades in relative obscurity, creating works of literary genius (although you never know). In fact, […]
“I like the bigness and darkness of 19th-century Russian literature. (I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon.)” – Roddy Doyle [No word on what his wife brought]. Roddy Doyle, of The Commitments fame, has a brilliant article in The Irish Times on his translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector currently playing in […]
An article in Czech Position on the 2011 Josef Škvorecký Prize going to Czech novelist, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Martin Ryšavý for his novel Vrač. Continue Reading
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