As part of the Different Window series, authors writing in Catalan, Portuguese and Polish share translations of short stories which featured in this year's Best European Fiction 2011 anthology. They discuss her work with the anthology's editor Aleksandar Hemon as they confront the issue of what Europe itself means in the 21st century and how the notion of a "European Literature" is a continuously shifting concept.
Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland's leading fiction writers whose novels include House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Times. She is joined at the reading by her translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Catalan author and cultural critic Merce Ibarz and Goncalo Tavares, a Portuguese author whose novel Jerusalem won the Jose Saramago prize in 2005 , are also taking part in the event.
Best European Fiction 2011 is the second edition of an annual anthology of stories from across Europe, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
With authors ranging from the familiar (Hilary Mantel) to the obscure (Macedonia's Blaze Minevski) to the internationally acclaimed but underappreciated in the U.S.A. (Spain's Enrique Vila-Matas; Hungary's László Krasznahorkai; Poland's Olga Tokarczuk), the second volume of this lauded series makes good on the first's promise. Zurab Lezhava's "Sex for Fridge" is the madcap story of a Georgian woman who tries to trade her body for a discount on a run-down refrigerator. Iulian Ciocan's "Auntie Frosea" takes as its depressing protagonist an impoverished Moldovan housewife whose only knowledge of the world outside her village comes from the beamed-in Brazilian soap opera she's addicted to. There's also plenty of Euro-surrealism: Olga Tokarczuk's haunting "The Ugliest Woman in the World" tells the story of a man who marries and has kids with a rather unbecoming woman, while László Krasznahorkai's "The Bill" is a nine-page, one-sentence meditation on the zone between male desire and possession. With stories from Montenegro, Cyprus, and even tiny Liechtenstein aside works from Turkey, Estonia, and most of Western Europe, this edition packs both a stylistic punch and a satisfying range.
-Publishers Weekly, Copyright © PWxyz
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Source:: www.polishculture.org, www.dalkeyarchive.comBest European Fiction 2011
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (2010)
ISBN-10: 9781564786005
ISBN-13: 978-1564786005