“Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time.”

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). 

“I can’t think of any better way of describing stickiness than stickiness.”

When I was a kid, I always wanted to inhabit the Wild West. It was the most exotic place. And now, I guess, I do.

The problem with American books is that there must always be something moral and sympathetic happening between characters. That’s not my experience of life.

Adam Thirlwell remembers Bob Silvers, who gave his writers “the courage of your interests and intuitions.”

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, age twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan—for the young Krzhizhanovsky was …

Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of My Purity is narrated by Piero Rosini. This Piero seems like most other modern schlubs—thirty, overweight, bourgeois, in a sexless marriage, you know it—but the thing that makes him unusual is his deep belief i…

My first memory of Václav Havel is of watching the news as a kid, after the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and seeing pictures of Havel in his living room: a prison of stuffed bookshelves. For me, Havel was the image of a literary hero, an ideal of liter…