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Literary roundup: Life’s cheerless dance – Szymborska, Joseph Roth and...
Wisława Szymborska died on February 1 and as the remembrances and tributes pour forth a couple of very good ones that have come out in the last few days include Ruth Franklin’s “A Requiem to an Age of...
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Literary roundup: BTBA longlist, Tolstoy and death
The Best Translated Book Award’s longlist was just announced and its 25 titles contain a handful of novels from this part of the world: Poland: Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, In Red by...
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Literary roundup: Jerusalem Festival and a publisher’s campaign
“The mist that came from the Mediterranean sea blotted out the city that Pilate so detested. The suspension bridges connecting the temple with the grim fortress of Antonia vanished, the murk descended...
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Literary confinement: Part III – On rock’n writing and the three-minute song
Part I of literary confinement dealt with the conformist aspect of needing to put translated literature into “the conversation” and what is lost when everyone reads virtually the same books. In Part II...
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The quaint phenomenon of the novel
At The Brooklyn Rail, English philosopher Simon Critchley takes on the subject of contemporary art in an article entitled “Absolutely-Too-Much.” It’s a fascinating article, but what struck me was his...
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Angelus CE Literary Award semi-finalists
A list of 14 writers from Central Europe makes up the semi-finalists of Poland’s Angelus Central European Literature Award. The prize selects books from the region that have been published in Polish...
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Literary roundup: Miklós Szentkuthy, Casanova and long Hungarian sentences
Hungarian Literature Online has published the introduction to Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, which is being published in an English translation by Tim Wilkinson by the Contra Mundum Press...
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Central/Eastern European novels 2013
The Millions has put out a long and translation-heavy list of books to be published in 2013 in the US. There are quite a few Central and Eastern European novels to look forward to, including a few I...
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Literary roundup: Anxious, dark and scary
The ongoing Anxiety series at The New York Times features a contribution from László Krasznahorkai that might be described as a bit beyond anxious. “I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I...
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Literary roundup: Budapest bookfest, Polish crime writing and a literary...
The 20th International Book Festival Budapest runs from April 18 to 21 with Italy as the country Guest of Honor and Michel Houellebecq as the writer Guest of Honor. Houellebecq’s novel Lanzarote will...
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BTBA 2014: Krasznahorkai does it again
For the second year running Hungarian László Krasznahorkai has won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. His novel Seiobo There Below, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, was the winner after he won...
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Literary roundup: Music, literature and blood
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review...
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Literary roundup: Ukrainian parallels and Hungarian translation
In n+1 Sophie Pinkham parallels Ukraine today and through the eyes of the great but largely unknown Kyiv-raised Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, when, for a time certainly, the country was even...
View ArticleLiterary roundup: the wolves of Krasznahorkai, Fabula and a translation tale
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...
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