I greet your gliding flight O wings of deathThose who resisted itHave purple facesHave bloodshot eyes like a withering grape leaf – from the latest offering in the Winter 2021 Issue of B O D Y is a poem titled “The Trapdoor”, excerpted from the 1936 work of poet Vítězslav Nezval, Woman in the Plural, […]
On Sept 29 there will be a book launch for The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítězslav Nezval, translated into English by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická and published by Twisted Spoon Press. The great Czech poet published the book in 1937 and is considered one of the masterpieces of interwar surrealism. Novická and Delbos received a […]
“When Phoebe Hicks conducted her first séance, when she became the first medium in New England, when her fame began to entice other women to embark on a similar career, no one foresaw, of course, what would distinguish her from her successors. This difference, not so crucial at first glance, fundamentally influenced Phoebe’s story.” From […]
Author of Maidenhair and the just released The Light and the Dark, Mikhail Shishkin, wrote an article for English PEN on the Potemkin village of the Winter Olympics, now underway in Sochi at the cost of a mere $50 billion, a sum we can all agree is well worth it for a few weeks of […]
“On Thursday, as always, I was awakened by the radio. Listening to the news while brushing my teeth— I have a radio right in my bathroom— I heard about the flood in the state of Pueblo, Mexico in which two thousand people had drowned. Now, I don’t know if that was the first time this […]
In Granta’s ongoing Best Untranslated Writers series author of the fantastic East of the West (reviewed on Literalab here) Miroslav Penkov chooses to feature “The Brave Words of Petar Delchev.” Delchev has been a sailor in the Black Sea and more recently been “restoring ruined village houses” and “managing a tailoring factory” all the while […]
My article on the recent Švankmajer exhibition in Prague has just been published in New Eastern Europe magazine’s Spring 2013 issue. “The Last of the Great Surrealists: Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue – Between Film and Fine Art” is about the Czech artist and filmmaker’s extremely diverse art and film work as well as his […]
The first solo retrospective of Jindřich Heisler provides a long overdue look at a unique man who created unique art under unique circumstances Jindřich Heisler: Surrealism under Pressure at Chicago’s Art Institute presents 70 works by the still little-known Czech Surrealist whose work straddles the line between a variety of artistic media. The exhibition also […]
Publishing collective Calypso Editions has followed up its new translation of Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need and its collection of Polish poet Anna Swir’s poems about the Warsaw Uprising, Building the Barricade and Other Poems, with an anthology of Romanian poetry titled Of Gentle Wolves. Translated by Martin Woodside the slim book […]
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