The Missing Slate has a host of Central European fare just out. Their story of the week is “How We Killed The Sailor” by Alma Lazarevska, translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth. It comes from Lazarevska’s collection Death in the Museum of Modern Art recently published by Istros Books, a book of short stories […]
The latest issue of Asymptote is out with an awesome Latin America Fiction Feature, including work by Sergio Chejfec, Cristina Peri Rossi, Lina Meruane and Julián Herbert as well as an essay by César Aira on Osvaldo Lamborghini. The esteemed translators bringing this work into English include many who have worked with B O D […]
Ruth Franklin has an excellent article on Gombrowicz at The New Yorker (subscription required), placing the new translation of his diaries in a context that provides the requisite history without weighing the reader down (as most critics seem to) with the obligatory yet incomprehensible need to go on and on about his Polishness the way […]
In the Financial Times novelist Jennie Erdal poses the question of whether it’s still possible to write philosophical novels the way Dostoevsky and Tolstoy once did. While it is quite easy to disagree with her premise and point out any number of philosophical novels being written today, the article is indicative of a much deeper […]
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, […]
Is the poet who engaged in grimace contests being fixed into the useful image of a European literary saint? The centenary of Czesław Miłosz falls on June 30 of this year amidst a more than yearlong array of festivals, readings, official declarations and celebrations stretching from the poet’s birthplace in Lithuania to Poland and the […]
“The greatest literary figures of Central Europe in the twentieth century (Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, but Freud as well) rebelled (they were very much alone in that rebellion) against the legacy of the preceding century, which in their part of Europe bowed under the particularly heavy weight of Romanticism. They felt that in its vulgar […]
1954 XI. Tuesday With Ernesto Sabato (an Argentine writer) in the bar Helvetico. Besides writing, Sabato teaches philosophy privately and initiates me into his method. He says Hay que golpear (one must strike). One must tear them away from the reality to which they have become accustomed and cause them to see everything anew. Their […]
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