Mathias Énard is the defining novelist of Schengen-era Europe: its most lyrical cartographer and its fiercest critic. His proto-modernist works feature the transnational destinies of the perennially nationless; they turn on transit, fragment at border crossings, ferment at immigration depots; they dissolve into the vast, palimpsestic geographies of the Mediterranean and Eurasian plate, colliding at the edges in a fractured totality that resists the closures of national mythology. If the Trea...| European Literature Network
Perspectives begins, naturally, with a murder. Jacopo da Pontormo, the painter often credited with shifting the course of Florentine Renaissance art, has been stabbed through the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’ in San Lorenzo (since tragically lost to a fire in the eighteenth century, though still venerated by art historians as near-equals to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel). According to Giorgio Vasari’s influential account of the period, The Lives of the Artis...| European Literature Network
Limerence and the Actress I am, for some at least, an object, a thing, and, grammatically-speaking, I can live with that. Philosophically, maybe not so much. From a psychological perspective, however, I can see why I might become an object of infatuation— you have to love some thing, you have to want some thing and […]| European Literature Network
Recently published in English by Moth Books, in a luminous translation by Ruth Martin, Iris Wolff’s Blurred tells the story of four generations in the life of a German-speaking family from Romania. Over the century the family is scattered by economics, choice and exigency: the book opens in the Banat and closes in South Germany, […]| European Literature Network
This is a sad book, a beautiful book. It’s about the death of a father – the death of the narrator’s father, the death also of Georgi Gospodinov’s father. (As so often in his work, Gospodinov is both participant and observer.) Death and the Gardener is enquiring about the human condition; it’s wise, it’s lyrical; […]| European Literature Network
‘That night, he had no idea he was walking over a cemetery. A secret cemetery with no gravestones or crosses, and only two dead bodies. There would be three by the time he left.’ These are the opening lines of a compulsive novel, the first translated into English by Spanish author Rosa Ribas, which maintains […]| European Literature Network
In Irene Solà’s fantastical third novel, animals reign supreme. From the woods that surround the remote Catalonian farmhouse where old Bernadeta with her ‘lizard lids’ lies dying, they come to stalk the pages: wolves, owls, foxes, spiders. The house, too, is a creature, with an ‘entrance … damp and dark, like a throat’ and ‘a […]| European Literature Network
Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Prieur as an exhaustive examination of one man’s mind, with the biographer ‘descend[ing] 20,000 leagues beneath the sea’ to plumb its great depths. But no matter what depths are dived, ‘the v...| European Literature Network
“Tale of the Tower” is by Stephen Toogood, a Tbilisi-based teacher who enjoys guitar and 20th-century American literature. He received a BA in creative writing and an MA in sonic arts from the University of Winchester. His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review and The Madison Review. “Tale of the Tower” was inspired by Magyar fairy tales. It explores liminal spaces and mystical symbolism. Its conclusion, while fatalistic, reflects the tradition from which the poem emerges. Multiple sto...| European Literature Network
I’ve longed to visit Trieste for many years and finally made it this July. Inspired by friends and writers who have long extolled the exceptional geography and culture of this easternmost Italian port city; inspired too by its famous visitors, James Joyce and Jan Morris, also by writer-friend Diego Marani who now lives part of the year in Trieste, and by the fact that Trieste has just opened a Literature Museum, I knew the time had come. I can happily confirm that Trieste is a remarkable ci...| ELN
At Trafika Europe, we prefer to receive submissions from authors and translators who have discovered a gem of European literature that has yet to be published. Oftentimes, we combine submissions with works recently published by publishing houses. It takes a lot of research to find pieces because there are numerous great publishing houses out there. For this week’s TE Corner, I thought I would share five of my favorites at this moment. | European Literature Network
UCL European Institute and UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities, in partnership with EUNIC London and the European Literature Network, are pleased to announce that the Irish writer Ciara Broderick has been selected as UCL’s 2025 European Literary Map of London Writer in Residence.| European Literature Network
