“As soon as her mother turned away to do some other chore, the girl tore off pieces of dough and made them into little figures. She lined them up in front of her, stabbed them with a fork and groaned as if she were they; she chopped off one’s head and made the others play […]
The Calvert Journal has compiled a list of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe (also Central Europe) and Central Asia. It’s a fascinating list put together by a wide range of writers, translators, academics coming from a number of different countries and languages besides English. The list includes a number of books and writers […]
“You leave Fitting Room no. 5 and drift tiredly down the dark corridor, and in your reflection you watch the shining of your shimmery scales beneath the dim gleam of the neon lights. A hazy sign high on the walls at the side leads you on toward the luxurious center. You travel like an illuminated […]
Istros Books has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to translate and publish Under Pressure, a short story collection by war veteran and writer, Faruk Šehić. Šehić’s debut novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in Will Firth’s English translation by Istros, won the 2013 EU Prize for Literature. The book was first published in Bosnian […]
“The army wanted my brother to report the next day at nine o’clock. The draft card covered up the ladies with their long skirts at the evening cabaret. France cabarets its nights away. I was born here, where a different program is in store. A mix of fear and bitterness suddenly overwhelmed me and wouldn’t […]
At Literary Hub, B O D Y-favorite translator Will Firth has compiled a list of 10 books by women writers from the Balkans that he’d like to see in translated into English. As he points out in his introduction, there are very few books in translation and of these, only about 25% are by women […]
“I killed several individual enemies in hand-to-hand combat, so now my fellow townspeople avoid me, and when I walk down the street everyone crosses to the other side. I can just smell their fear. It reeks of loathing, of Hegel and Kant, of the universal sense of human life and of so-called human kindness; all […]
“It all began with a rather unusual encounter in a first-class compartment of the Belgrade-Skopje express train.” So begins Aleksandar Prokopiev’s short story “Papradishki” translated from the Macedonian by Will Firth. But from the beginning, which could be the opening chapter of a detective novel with references to Hercule Poirot and Maigret, the story enters […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
The death of Rasputin at the hands of a British Secret Service agent – an excerpt a kaleidoscopic book of the First World War, The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica, translated from the Serbian by Will Firth. Aleksandar Gatalica will be appearing in the UK for four appearances beginning 10th November: Monday, 10th November 18:30: […]
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