and just like that it was time to pack up and leave to roll up my life move it from the small apartment into a larger one black bags white bags nothing fits in there easily a life well folded tightened into the cupboards clothes, shoes, panties, rings, blank pictures and frames big earrings rusty [&
Karl-Markus Gauß is the foremost literary cartographer of a vanishing Europe. His wide-ranging and incisive essays chronicle the diversity and wealth of languages and cultures, predominantly in Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary European identities but now ri
France has blocked accession negotiations between Albania and the EU. A French journalist, Colette Delacroix, goes to Tirana to interview the Albanian prime minister about the veto. Intent on revenge, the latter turns up late in his sports clothes and gives flippant answers to her questions. But onc
Robert Menasse, who was born in Vienna in 1954, is a novelist and essayist. His non-fiction output has focused on cultural theory, Austrian identity and, more recently, the European Union. In 2017 he published Die Hauptstadt (The Capital, translation Jamie Bulloch, MacLehose Press, 2019), a novel ex
Publishing literature in translation is notoriously expensive, and many publishers shy away from it due to the sheer cost it entails. Funding, then, is essential to increase the number of translated Spanish books that make their way into English readers’ hands. When we consider that independent pu
Those of us who use language chiefly as a means of communication (most of us, in other words) can never fully understand what it’s like to select it as a way to express identity or even political resistance. Spain has four national languages, and anyone who isn’t speaking the one used by the maj
