Carnival

Fiction, Reviews, Translation, Women in Translation - December 03, 2019

Another great review for The Night Circus!

The reviews for The Night Circus by Uršula Kovalyk have been coming in thick and fast recently, and all of them glowingly positive. In case you missed it, here's another one! "It is the reality of Central Europe that knows wholesale transformations because it has lived through them. To bring this life onto the page in such short, intense bursts requires something out of the ordinary, and in this diverse collection Uršula Kovalyk has found the imagery, focus, language and daring to have created something legitimately new."

Book Review: Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen in Modern Poetry in Translation

A Thousandfold Loving: Derick Mattern reviews Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen, edited by Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, and Caroline Stockford, Parthian, 2019. 'Haydar Ergülen is the most prominent of a group of poets that emerged during the 1980s in Turkey, an era woefully underrepresented in translation. Drawing on some forty years of work, this selection of nearly eighty poems is the first volume of his work – and the first major work of his generation – to appear in English. 'A poet of deep affections, this selection highlights Ergülen’s love poems, his summer poems, his nostalgias, his constant connection to the...

The Night Circus Review Round-up!

Uršuľa Kovalyk's short story collection, The Night Circus and Other Stories, has been on a whirlwind tour of Britain this autumn, and collected reviews from far and wide. Feminist, poignant, vividly imaginative, it was described by European Literature Network thus: "A strongly feminist perspective expresses itself in the way such longings materialise, often independently of a woman’s consciousness, in dreamlike experiences presented as real – full of vibrant colour and luscious sensuousness, where women are literally rejuvenated." The London Magazine applauded the richness of Kovalyk's prose and themes: "Kovalyk is striking in the boldness of her imagination: we encounter cute and...

Book Review: The Night Circus

'Kovalyk’s vision is startlingly original. She interweaves elements of magic realism and the supernatural into her fables with terrific effect.' Lucy Popescu reviews the short story collection The Night Circus for BookBlast. ABOUT THE BOOK: ‘...riotous, funny and painful’ - European Literature Network on Kovalyk Europa Carnivale series title Creative Europe award title Shortlisted author for Slovakia’s prestigious Anasoft Litera Award Bibliotéka Prize winning author, 2013 I found him one morning when I went to take out the rubbish. He lay in the grass, clutching a piece of dirty plastic in his tiny baby hands. Blending the naturalistic and the fabulistic, these elusive,...