‘Come and look!’ Breathless I walk into the office carrying one of the big boxes that have just come and are now cluttering our hallway. I feel my face red from effort and excitement. I drop the box onto the floor, bend over it and start to open it. ‘Don’t!’ Peirene shrieks. Startled, I s
The Joke’s on Us In my first column here, I wrote about the theme of unhappy childhoods in contemporary Hungarian literature, focussing on three books: Szilárd Borbély’s The Dispossessed, Ferenc Barnás’ The Ninth, and György Dragomán’s The White King. Something, I said, all these books
France’s election campaign was in full swing. The Conservatives and French far-right wing parties have done their best to bolster their ideas about national identity. At this auspicious moment, Patrick Boucheron’s Histoire mondiale de la France has been published – an entirely different in
Novels can naturally be written about people who live on remote farms in the Markgraviate of Brandenburg or who spend their days in stately villas in even more elegant suburbs along the River Elbe. Usually, however, it is more rewarding for literature if they transform locations into stages where ma
‘Peirene, we are using single speech marks, not double,’ I say. ‘You have to be consistent.’ ‘I am consistent,’ she insists. ‘No you are not. Here you use double and here single.’ I point to the screen. ‘Speech marks are speech marks,’ I hear her mutter. ‘Please double check al
Has there ever been a more interesting – and important – time for fiction in translation? Join the TLS and BookMachine for an evening of discussion about global literature and its place in the English-speaking world. BookMachine is an informal event series. You are guaranteed to meet someone int
