The Golden Age [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
>
Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova is the second volume in a trilogy of autobiographical novels based on Bohumil Hrabal’s courtship of and marriage to Eliška Plevová (nicknamed Pipsi) and the first decade or so of his fame as one of Czechoslovakia’s most beloved writers. Originally published in samizdat in Prague in 1986, not long before ...
>
Latest Review: "Vita Nuova" by Bohumil Hrabal
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. Dan Vitale is a regular contributor to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from ...
>
National Translation Award to Alex Zucker for "All This Belongs to Me"
Really late with my ALTA 2010 write-ups (there are a couple in the works though), but I wanted to make a special post congratulating Alex Zucker on receiving this year’s National Translation Award for his translation from the Czech of Petra Hulova’s All This Belongs to Me. From the press release: Alex ...
>
"This Part of Town Is No Place For Old-Timers" by Jachym Topol [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The final installment in The Guardian‘s_ Stories from a New Europe series is This Part of Town Is No Place for Old-Timers by Czech author Jachym Topol. David Short translated this piece about a Czech writer remembering life before 1989, his father’s failure as a writer and dissident, and how the post-wall society ...
>
European Book Club
I’m somewhat ashamed that this is the first time we’re posting about the European Book Club. I’m not sure exactly when this started (I just found out about it from Bill Martin of the Polish Cultural Institute), but looking at the books included in the 2008 program—Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, ...
>