Dominican Republic | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Alba Mota-Santana was born in the Dominican Republic and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Julian Rodríguez is a screenwriter and filmmaker currently residing in New Jersey and Mexico.
Since the 1980s, Yi Lu has established herself as one of the most widely-read female poets in contemporary China. Born in 1956, she has authored four books of poetry, including the award-winning titles See (2004) and Using Two Seas (2009). Known for an elegant and distilled lyrical voice, her poems are at once meditative and vibrant. Recent national honors include the Hundred Flowers Award and the Distinguished Literary Prize from the Fujian Province. Serving as an active theatre design artist at the People's Art Theatre in Fujian, Yi Lu is also ranked as China's preeminent national scenographer and stage designer.
Bai Hua is considered to be the central literary figure of the post-Misty Poetry movement during the 1980s. Born in 1956 in Chongqing, he read English literature at Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute before graduating with a master's degree in Western literary history from Sichuan University. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), found immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has a small but selective poetic output: in the past thirty years he's written approximately ninety poems, most of which command a large audience in his nation today. After a silence of more than a decade, he began writing poetry again in 2007. That same year, his work garnered the prestigious Rougang Poetry Award. A prolific writer of critical prose and hybrid texts, Bai Hua is also a recipient of the Anne Kao Poetry Prize. Currently living in Chengdu, Sichuan, he teaches at the Southwestern Transportation University.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
March, 2011Anatoly Gavrilov's minimalist style is marked by extreme laconism and painstaking lexical and grammatical selection, which affords his stories a measure of heightened density. He belongs to what Osip Mandelstam called a "minor line" of Russian literature--the tradition that began with Nikolai Gogol, Evgenii Boratynskii, and Fedor Sologub, and continued in the twentieth century with Daniil Kharms, Leonid Dobychin, and Evgenii Kharitonov. While attention to word selection and style unites him with such Modernist master stylists as Bruno Schulz, Isaak Babel, and Vladimir Nabokov, his poetics are certainly more comparable to Kafka and Beckett. The marginally tragic-comical distance Gavrilov establishes to his narrators/protagonists is reminiscent of Robert Walser. Here's an excerpt from a recent review of Gavrilov's collection by Igor' Klekh (translated by Sasha Spektor):
"Gavrilov is a grotesque, hallucinogenic, extremely formal writer--somewhat in the tradition of French literature. The exquisite style together with the notorious atrociousness of the described subject, the absence of falsity--this is all that Gavrilov can offer to his real, potential, and hypothetical readers. The music that he, in his words, "hates," determines the construction of his texts. Rhythm is the main structural element of Gavrilov's prose. While the words can be chosen randomly, what's important is their repetition, each time performed with a precise degree of difference. This dance of the simplest words, the whirlwind of dance positions hypnotizes the reader."
Gellu Naum (1915-2001) remains one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. He started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with Andre Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s (where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne). After returning home to Romania, in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career that kept his verse inexpugnable to the Communist regime's political agenda while continuously reshaping surrealism into a chameleonic complex oeuvre that absorbed popular culture and managed to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions. His highly influential work both encompassed and veiled political critique, Eastern and Western spirituality, occultism, literary tradition, and mordant oneiric ironies.
Polina Barskova is known as one of the best Russian poets of her generation. She has won a number of awards for her poetry.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2011Die Alaskastrasse is a road novel, a tale of men against men and men against women. It details conflict both exterior and interior; it takes an unsparing look at insecurity, lethargy, and boredom. It is suffused, in the words of one critic, with "an erotic pessimism." The unnamed narrator in an unnamed city quits his job as web manager at an Internet dating firm and takes a spur of the moment trip with his girlfriend to an unnamed island that ends badly, setting in motion a quest (the tip-off is the book's epigraph, from Walker Percy's Lancelot) for some sort of inchoate fulfillment. Die Alaskastrasse is a dark, funny, compelling, self-lacerating passion play, shot through with a coruscating moral intelligence.
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Known for his famous definition of Acmeism as "nostalgia (or thirst) for world culture," in the later poem of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote: "Do not tempt foreign tongues--attempt forgetting them, alas,/Because your teeth will never bite the glass," which seems to deny everything he believed.
Having gone through all the circles of earthly hell and purgatory and anticipating his own arrest and perhaps death, Mandelstam, nevertheless, claims that heaven is a "lifetime home" creating thus his own pattern of "Paradiso terrestre."
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The "Slate Ode" is one of the most esoteric poems in Mandelstam's creativity. The poet is known for his exceptional manner of hiding allusions and destroying bridges-associations.
Omry Ronen in his profound book An Approach to Mandelstam made diachronic and synchronic analyses of "The Slate Ode" and "January 1, 1924."(1) While restoring the bridges in these of Mandelstam's poems written in 1923, Ronen hit the right target and even created a kind of a history of the Russian verse from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to the twentieth century on the one hand, and connected Mandelstam's prose, essays, and poetry on the other, by thus achieving a striking and sometimes a superfluous effect as, for example, in his citations of the use of blazhen and blagosloven (blessed) in Russian poetry: since Derzhavin and especially Pushkin there was hardly a Russian poet who did not use these words.
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