He writes, “Georgi Gospodinov published his first poem in a local newspaper when he was nine, and for this he received the then-incredible amount of 4.50 levs (around $3.00). He quickly figured out that twenty poems would be enough to buy him a Balkan bicycle (the only kind available at the time). Sadly, he didn’t manage to work his way up to this amount.
He loves to write about things that haven’t happened, and how they’re more important than anything that actually has. His native land is full of things that have unhappened. Other favorite techniques: sometimes he uses a fly’s point of view to radically undermine our raging anthropocentrism, which he finds highly anti-ecological. What would the history of the world be like if it was told by a fly? He also likes to focus on childhood, ‘when for the last time we were loved without a reason, for the simple fact that we existed.’ Other focuses: toilets, anything that’s been suppressed, things without voices—since these all belong to the same story.
His favorite genre is the aforementioned ‘natural novel,’ which can mix—and in a single book—a Bible for flies, lists of things one enjoyed in the ’70s, collections of classic novel openings, and various stories from the ’90s. Favorite themes? Just one: how to find a miracle where miracles, principally, have been denied us—in our own everyday lives. Also: why in God’s name are our lives so unfairly short?”
JULIAN GOUGH was born in London, to parents of an exquisite, almost excessive Irishness. When he was seven, the family returned to Tipperary. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, back when throwing a boy across the room was considered healthful exercise for both parties. At university in Galway, he began writing and singing with the underground literary rock band Toasted Heretic. They released four albums, and had a top ten hit in Ireland in 1991 with “Galway and Los Angeles,” a song about not kissing Sinead O’Connor.
His first novel, Juno & Juliet, was published in 2001. In 2007, his second book, Jude: Level 1, was described by the Sunday Tribune as possibly “the finest comic novel since Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and was shortlisted for the Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Will Self, controversially, won. Gough subsequently kidnapped Will Self’s pig, and posted the ransom video on YouTube.
The self-contained story “The Orphan and the Mob” forms the prologue to Jude: Level 1. It won the BBC National Short Story Award (the world’s largest annual prize for a single short story).
Gough writes, “The West suffers from an unexamined cultural cringe before the Greeks. We’ve also thoroughly misunderstood them. The Greeks themselves believed that tragedy is the merely human view of life: comedy is superior, being the Gods’ view.
But our classical inheritance is lopsided. We have a rich range of tragedies, but of the comic writers, only Aristophanes survived. (Comedies laugh at the naked emperor; tragedies weep at the loss of his clothes. Emperors tend to prefer, and preserve, tragedies.) More importantly, Aristotle’s work on tragedy survived; his work on comedy did not. Western literature has been off-centre ever since.
Of course Europe in the Middle Ages was peculiarly primed to rediscover tragedy: the one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book was at heart tragic. The Bible, from apple to Armageddon, does not contain a single joke.
Post-Renaissance, secular writers still felt the need for a holy book to guide them. Aristotle’s Poetics provided that. If you wanted to write tragedy or epic, here were the classical rules. The University seamlessly succeeded the Universal Church, but tragedy remained the dominant mode. As a result, comedy’s potential still has not been fully explored.
My generation, and those younger, receive information not in long, coherent, self-contained units (a film, an album, a novel), but in short bursts, with wildly different tones. (Channel-hopping, surfing the Internet, while doing the iPod shuffle.) That changes the way we read fiction, and therefore must change the way we write it. This is not a catastrophe; it is an opportunity. We are free to do new things, which could not have been understood before now. The traditional story (retold ten thousand times), suffers from repetitive strain injury. Television and the Internet have responded to this crisis without losing their audience. Literary fiction has not.
Steal from the Simpsons, not Henry James.”
ALASDAIR GRAY
A CHRONOLOGY AND LIST OF SELECTED PAST WORK
12/28/34 Born in Riddrie, a good east Glasgow Corporation housing scheme.
1957 Diploma in Mural Painting and Design, Glasgow School of Art.
1957–62 Part-time art teacher. Paints murals in Scottish-USSR Friendship Society; Greenhead Church of Scotland, Bridgeton; Bellaisle Street Synagogue.
1962–65 Theatre scene painter, social security scrounger, artist.
1964 A fifty-minute BBC television documentary about my paintings and poetry gave me the experience to write my first TV play, The Fall of Kelvin Walker. I became a self-employed artist and playwright.
1967–77 Five TV plays networked, six radio plays broadcast, one full-length and five one-act stage play performed.
1969–95 Murals: Falls of Clyde in Kirkfieldbank Tavern; The Story of Ruth in Fulton Transept, Greenbank Church of Scotland, Glasgow; Oak Tree Ecological Cycle in Palacerigg Nature Reserve; Arcadia in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant, Glasgow; The Thistle of Dunfermline History in Abbot House Local History Museum, Dunfermline.
1974 Retrospective painting exhibition, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
1975 Around this time, for various reasons, I received no more commissions to write plays until 2004.
1977–78 Glasgow’s Artist Recorder, painting 32 portraits and cityscapes for the People’s Palace Local History Museum.
1977–79 Writer in Residence, University of Glasgow.
1981 Publication of Lanark, my first novel. This was planned as a prose epic—a Scottish petite bourgeois model of the universe, which university lecturers think my best work. From this time onward I became a designer of my own books and occasionally those of other authors.
1983–2008 Eight more novels published, four short-story collections, three political pamphlets, two books of verse, two books of plays, one short history of Scottish literature.
2000 The Book of Prefaces, anthology with essays and marginalia amounting to a history of English literature in four nations.
CURRENT WORK
In 2003 began a large scheme of mural decoration for the Oran Mor Art and Leisure Centre, Glasgow. The auditorium ceiling is completed; the walls are still being worked upon. Two books are also being worked upon: A Gray Playbook and A Life in Pictures, for 2009 and 2010.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
My imagination has been shaped by too many other authors and artists to name here, but I love the work of Hans Andersen, Lewis Carroll, William Blake, James Joyce, Kafka, Coleridge, and anonymous makers of Scottish ballads. I do not know how my work fits into any literary tradition—there are many of them if we include the Old Testament, the Arabian Nights, and the Chinese Monkey. I fear I have baked more literary cakes than readers will have time and appetite to digest. In 2007 I was filling a ledger with lines for my verse play Fleck, a modern version of Goethe’s Faust (published by Two Ravens Press). Words by which a beggar introduces himself before telling the story of Ann Bonny started happening among these—I don’t know why, though when working out one big idea my imagination sometimes relieves itself by seizing on something different. My seafaring knowledge comes from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Melville’s Moby Dick and White Jacket, and the beggar derives a lot from Blind Pew. “The Ballad of Ann Bonny” is the only thing I have written that has been translated into Hebrew.
GEORGE KONRÁD was born in 1933, and grew up amid the horrors of fascism and the Second World War, narrowly escaping the Nazi concentration camps. He saw the Germans leave Budapest, only to be replaced by the Russians. He fought the Soviet tanks in the 1956 uprising, was imprisoned for his writing, which he then saw censored, and fled abroad a number of times—always returning to hi
s homeland.
He has worked as a social worker, editor, and sociologist, and is considered Hungary’s preeminent essayist and novelist. He is the author of numerous books, including A látogató (1969), translated into English as The Case Worker(1974), A városalapító (1977), translated into English as The City Builder (1977) and A cincos (1978), translated into English as The Loser (1982), and Elutazás és Hazatérés (2001), translated into English as A Guest in My Own Country (2007). Konrád lives in Budapest.
As Konrád said during a recent interview with Thomas Ország-Land in Hungarian Literature Online, “I’ve been a Jewish Hungarian or a Hungarian Jew at various stages of my life…Today, I am a Jew when I hear that the Jews are mean and pushy. And I am a Hungarian when people say that the Hungarians are fascists.”
Celebrated for his memoirs as well as his novels, Konrád had this to say on the division between autobiography and fiction, in a 2007 Jewish Daily Forward interview with Joshua Cohen: “There’s not too much difference. I realized if I kept out fiction, what would remain was fiction, too. Speaking from a certain distance, everything that happens to us in our lives eventually becomes fictionalized, a fiction: Our minds fictionalize our memories, which are not as much chronological as they are geographical. It’s as if what we remember are only islands of oil floating upon the surface of a sea of everything that has ever happened to us.”
PETER KRIŠTÚFEK was born in 1973, in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is a writer as well as director for television and film. He is the author of three collections of short stories—Nepresné miesto (Inexact Place, 2002), Vol’ným okom (By the Eye, 2004), and Mimo asu (Out of Time, 2009). In 2005, he brought out the conceptual novel Hviezda vystrihnutého záberu (The Star of the Cut-out Shot), and in 2008 he published his first “regular” novel, Šepkár (The Prompter), which was nominated for a European Book Prize, and from which the selection in this anthology was taken. He is a three-time finalist for the prestigious Slovak literary contest Poviedka (The Short Story), and his work has been published in many newspapers and magazines in Slovakia as well as foreign countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria).
He is now working on a novel entitled Dom hluchého (The House of the Deaf ), which is set in a small town during the years between 1934–1990, a time of many upheavals in Slovakian history.
He writes, “A great part of the tradition of European fiction is based on reflecting the complicated history of history. In my previous books (mostly short stories) I was concerned with the relationship between the individual and the society surrounding him or her, and often threatening him or her. The hero is—somehow—battling against the world, often trapped inside himself.
My novel The Prompter basically talks about the same things, but in a more overt and satirical way. The novel is situated in a nameless postcommunist country (since all of Central Europe seems to be in more or less the same boat), which has just started to learn about the “accomplishments of capitalism”: the dolce vita of political superstars, parliamentary speeches that say nothing, important summits that are actually luxurious parties, ubiquitous media attention, children born after the fall of communism and acting in ways that baffle their parents, and so forth—the future, in other words. This is the new theater of the absurd that the prompter, Kritof, passes through…
My greatest influence as far as commenting on the historical context of a particular era is Günter Grass, and to some extent Peter Høeg as well. Europe is the great theme. And I’ve become more and more interested in Slovak history as well: the history of a small nation, often dependent on the larger ones—which very much resembles the helplessness of the individual in a hostile society. Anyway, I try to look at these things with wit and irony.”
DEBORAH LEVY, a playwright, novelist and poet, was born in 1959 in South Africa. She moved to Britain with her family and studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts. She was a Creative Arts Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1989 and 1991. Her novels include Beautiful Mutants (1989, shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Swallowing Geography (1993), The Unloved(1995), and Billy and Girl (1999). Her short story collections include Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places (2003).
She writes, “When I was sixteen I wrote on paper napkins in a bus drivers’ café, known in the UK as a ‘greasy spoon.’ I had a vague idea this was how writers were supposed to behave because I had read books about glamorous existentialists drinking coffee in French cafés while they wrote about how unhappy they were.
There were no cafés like that in the UK at the time and certainly not in the gray suburb I lived in. But I was convinced a café was an essential key to escaping from my life and began my impersonation of the European Writing Life while drinking tea with the bus drivers while Angie the cook fried bacon and everyone stared glumly at the rain.
It would be right to observe therefore, that some of the writers and artists that lifted me out of the British rain, the tangle of the British class system, and a solid tradition of literary realism—and then walked me back to all of the above to search for my own voice—were the Surrealists, Freud, and above all, French pre-and post-war writers such as Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Robbe-Grillet…and later the novels Whatever by Michel Houellebecq and The Butcher by Alina Reyes. I throw in to this mix the American expatriates who found themselves in Paris for a while: Djuna Barnes, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, not to mention Edmund White, whose biography of Genet I consider one of the finest books to honour my shelves.
The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek seems to me to not only belong to a European tradition, but to have made a whole new language on the way. The British writer who most interests me after Angela Carter is the late and much mourned J. G. Ballard, both of whom helped build a literary atmosphere I feel most at home in.
Yet it would also be true to declare that my major influences will always be the children anywhere in the world who learn to transgress their way out of conflicts with bullies in the school playground and become adults interested in how personal and societal power (and the lack thereof ) can be rearranged, in both fiction and life. This then takes me to the novels of James Baldwin, to Mohamed Choukri (translated by Paul Bowles), Franz Fanon, and the writing of Edward Said. These days, all I know is that when I get nearer to an idea that has been interrupting my every day and begin to unfold it, to write it, I feel more alive. What else is there to do in life than feel more alive? In any tradition.”
VALTER HUGO MÃE was born in Angola in 1971, grew up in Paços de Ferreira in the north of Portugal, and has lived in Vila do Conde since 1981. He has an undergraduate degree in law and a graduate degree in Modern and Contemporary Portuguese Literature. He has published seven books of poetry and three novels; edited anthologies of the poets Manoel de Barros, José Régio, and Adília Lopes, among others; and translated works from Italian and Spanish. He also dabbles in art: his first show, “the face of gregor samsa,” took place in Porto in 2006.
valter hugo mãe’s first literary efforts were in poetry. A collection of his complete poetic work will appear in 2008 with the title folclore íntimo (intimate folklore). His first work of fiction, nosso reino (our kingdom), came out in 2004. The Diário de Notícias, a very important daily newspaper, called it the best Portuguese novel published that year. valter hugo mãe was awarded the José Saramago Prize in 2007.
He writes, “it’s hard to look at ourselves and realize exactly what our place is in life, including, and especially, as writers. i suppose i’m still a dreamer and write believing that books can make humankind better. they certainly made me—and hopefully keep on making me—a better and more conscientious person. i like to think that this effort of mine is easily understood by anyone who reads my novels, because they are always common people living through the heroic adventure of simply being alive.
i prefer to underline the weird and unexpected aspects of reality, because life is weird, after all, and reality, in fact, is merely personal, and is truly different for every
one. by sharing a particular point of view i hope to provoke a reader to decide what he or she needs to believe in. it’s not that i want the reader to agree with me, or with some character, this is really for the reader to decide and, by deciding, to participate. this will bring a reader to some sense of right and wrong—at least about my book and its subjects.
since childhood i have been interested in reading whatever could interfere most with my life, the life of a person from a small and somehow forgotten country such as portugal. living away from the big cities, growing up was wandering freely in the fields, but all the while i was sculpting away at my self, my insides, getting to know me and thinking that, despite my isolation, i was, after all, a person like every other person in the world. so, despite living in this tiny place, where i’ve always lived, i know i can feel and feel accurately the anguish of kafka’s gregor samsa, and am able to assume the same questioning sensibility as albert camus’s stranger, and can imagine my country drifting in the sea, as josé saramago did, and can be a luxurious snob along with oscar wilde, reading the dramatic story of dorian gray. i have spent my life with vergílio ferreira, herberto helder, lobo antunes, borges, stig dagerman, isidore ducasse, but also with herzog, lynch, bergman, pedro costa, oliveira, hitchcock, and goya, bosch, cruzeiro seixas, lisa santos silva, isabel lhano, and bach, billie holiday, amália, josé afonso, coltrane, patty waters, joão gilberto, caetano veloso, sonic youth, current 93, the cocteau twins, dead can dance, mão morta, radiohead, xiu xiu, sigur ros, antony and the johnsons, devendra banhart, and oh-my-nonexistent-god so many beautiful people i beg please forgive me not mentioning.”
COSMIN MANOLACHE was born in the town of Mizil, in Walachia, Romania, on January 16, 1973. He graduated from the A. I. Cuza Police Academy in 1995 and was subsequently posted to the Danube Delta as an officer of the Romanian Frontier Guard. Since 1998, he has worked as a curator at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. His work has been widely anthologized, and his first collection of short stories, Ce fat cumplit am (What a Frightful Face I Have), was published by Polirom in 2004. His forthcoming semi-autobiographical novel, Aether, is set in the Danube Delta.
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