Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
It’s the end of the world and at Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) they ask a sample of Russian writers such as German Sadulaev, Dmitry Bykov, Zakhar Prilepin and even Russian-American Gary Shteyngart about how they would spend their last day of human existence knowing the Mayans were right. The answers are interesting and unfortunately […]
There are many different ways writers can infuse a story or novel with intensity without much in the way of incident or plot. The movement can occur on symbolic or historical levels, they can mine literary history as their character walks around Dublin or devote all their attention to the beauty of the individual sentences […]
“Insallah,” he said, and took a long drag. “If NATO gives the green light, then we attack.” “Twins,” a story of the Libyan uprising from Hungarian writer and war correspondent Sándor Jászberényi is featured on Pilvax Magazine. And so yet another Central European writer has devoted his attention to the Arab/Islamic world without a peep […]
At Russia Beyond the Headlines novelist Zakhar Prilepin has written a broadside against the neglect of contemporary Russian literature, ongoing simplifications of Russia he sees coming from the West, and makes a case for a non-parodic, traditional, conservative form of Russian writing as it existed in the time of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Well, he is […]
Are English and American writers missing an opportunity to write political novels? And Jo Nesbø talking about the ethics of a fictional treatment of last year’s mass killing in Norway. Last week was rough for novelists. First their ability to write philosophical novels was questioned, now they are being taken to task for their inability […]
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been receiving a lot of critical attention lately due to the NYRB’s publication of his novel The Letter-Killers Club (most recently today in the latest Quarterly Conversation) but it was another of his unpublished, unseen works that recently saw the light at Princeton University. For the 1937 centennial of Alexander Pushkin’s death, […]
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