As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues along with the war of information accompanying it there has been a tendency to turn away from anything Russian as a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine. What this leaves out are Russian voices of dissent, voices that speak out despite the growing and significant risks involved. Among those […]
The nominees for the 2022 European Union Prize for Literature have been announced. The award is changing this year, with the jury choosing a single overall winner rather than one from each country. There are 14 nominees this year ranging from Ukraine and Georgia to Ireland and Spain. Among the selected writers is Slovakia’s Richard […]
Have you ever met a wolf? Not alive. Dead? Dead, yes. Does that mean a stuffed wolf? One stuffed, one run over, one killed. So begins the first part of a fantastic interview with László Krasznahorkai in Hungarian Literature Online in which he talks about everything from the disappearance of high culture, historical shifts and […]
The 6th annual Slovo Russian Literature Festival is underway in London, because with only the book fair going on there is a painful shortage of literary events in the British capital at the moment. The festival was opened by Boris Akunin, who will also be speaking this evening. Two other authors known for their novels […]
It isn’t only our own time filled with war and conflict. As the anniversary of the joyful and welcomed (by many) beginning of World War I is upon us, The New York Review of Books is republishing a recently discovered memoir of the war by Béla Zombory-Moldován entitled The Burning of the World in a […]
At Deutsche Welle there is article about the new Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co. Run by E.J. Van Lanen the e-book publisher is putting out a fascinating selection of novels in translation from Germany, Austria, Spain, Argentina and Italy. I have just read the debut novel they put out by Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, Under […]
The shortlist for the biennial Man Booker International Prize has been announced and it’s notably less Anglocentric than previous years with only three of the 10 listed authors writing in English, and one of those was born and raised to the age of 20 in the former Yugoslavia, that being Josip Novakovich (Canada). The other […]
It’s positively raining literary festivals in this part of the world. Bruno Schulz, Slovenia and now Berlin. It would be a miracle if there’s any actual writing getting done. The International Literature Festival Berlin is underway and among the Central and Eastern European writers taking part are Nobel prize winner Herta Müller, Péter Nádas (who, […]
Chtenia’s Summer 2012 issue is out and is devoted entirely to horses, with an essay on the animals’ role in Russian literature as well as translations of equestrian-themed work from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Kuprin among others. One odd feature of this magazine is that though there is a “Web links […]
Literary roundup: Pre-war Warsaw and Russian dystopias The first English translation of a book by Polish-Jewish author Józef Hen will be published later this month, according to the Polish Book Institute’s website. Nowolipie Street is a 1991 memoir of growing up in the lost world of Jewish Warsaw in the 1920s and 30s, up until […]
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