Where do film noir, post-communist Bulgarian fiction, and black comedy intersect? In Vladislav Todorov’s searing noir-meets-social-commentary novel, Zift. Contributing Editor Steven Wingate and Todorov discuss poisonings, the resurgence of narrative fiction in post-communist Eastern Europe, the idea that “many people enjoyed spying on their neighbors” for the state, and much more.
What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent?
Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.
Cerise Press has just launched their debut issue, which features artwork and photography as well as poetry, prose, translations, interviews, and reviews by writers such as Tess Gallagher, Ray Gonzalez, Laura Kasischke, Robert Kelly, Pura López-Colomé (translated by Forrest Gander), and Hai Zi (translated by Ye Chun). Click here for a full list of contributors and here for the Table of Contents by genre. This new online journal is a collaborative effort between three French and American editors (writer-translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain [Greta Aart] in Paris, poet Sally Molini in Nebraska, and poet Karen Rigby in Arizona) who aim to (per […]
