The latest issue of The Continental, a magazine I am editing and writing for, is out. The theme of the issue is Noir and includes work from a darker, crime-ridden era of New York City (otherwise known as the good ‘ol days) to a futurist Hungary, Russia, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Founder of Punk […]
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
At various times since the fall of the Iron Curtain there have been outbreaks of fear that hordes of criminals would cross the Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Hungarian borders to pillage the wealth of Western Europe. In 2012, it looks as if this long awaited crime wave is actually coming to pass, though in […]
Book jacket design is an ever interesting topic which exhibits an often sharp difference of aesthetics among its practitioners. I have written about it before in interviewing Peter Mendelsund about his designs for a recent edition of Kafka’s works. On his own blog Mendelsund has recently offered an insider’s view of designing book covers in […]
Murder in 1930s Budapest provides a panorama of a lost world Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir begins with a pair of deaths. On the one hand, these deaths practically could not have less to do with one another. The first is the real life death of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös on October 6, 1936 in Munich; […]
literalab 