Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

editor’s welcome (cont’d)

whopping works from elsewhere in Europe. Top Hungarian playwright György Spiró storms into the limelight with his magisterial novel, Captivity , excerpted here. This nearly- 900-page bildungsroman about first-century Jewish life has just been named one of the 10 Best fiction books of 2015 by The Wall Street Journal – we spoke with him about this work here (13 minutes). Bulgarian poet Georgi Gospodinov ’s The Physics of Sorrow , in English by Angela Rodel, has just been longlisted by PEN as one of the best translations of 2015. We interviewed him about this tantalizing sort-of novel, and its reflections on present-day Bulgaria, here (35 minutes). Russian Sergei Lebedev delivers amesmerizing, intensely lyrical foray into injustices buried in the past of the Soviet countryside. Italian transplant Catherine McNamara bring us a tale of disappearance in the Italian Dolomites. We get a first-ever glimpse in English of a seminal work of Danish experimental fiction from the strange and masterful Per Højholt – this novel’s ostensible subject is a flock of ambulating ears, capable solely of self-hearing, which grew from a silence that briefly fell across Europe in 1915 – and this issue is rounded out by poetry from Ukrainian Vasyl Lozynsky . Wow. Can there be a better holiday than this? Enjoy! By the way, you can learn more about the authors & works in a separate section at the end of this issue.

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