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"Brecht at Night" by Mati Unt [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next two days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Brecht at Night by Mati Unt. Translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens. (Estonia, Dalkey Archive) Below is a guest post from Bill Marx — the man behind ...

ELM #27

The new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available in print ant online. It’s a very poetry heavy issue, with articles about the “legendary” Heiti Talvik (who was the “guru” of his generation “like Burroughs was for the Beatniks”), on Maarja Kangro (the title of the ...

Estonian Literary Magazine

This actually arrived a few weeks ago (we’ve been a bit busy . . .), but the new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available both in print and online. Estonian Literary Magazine is published by the Estonian Literature Information Centre, which, in my opinion, is one of the best cultural organizations in ...

Obituary: Jaan Kross

Eric Dickens—translator of Kross and his fellow countryman Mati Unt, along with many other writers—offered to write an obituary of Jaan Kross for us. As Dickens points out, this is more than just an obituary—it’s also an overview of one of Estonia’s great writers who is hardly known in the ...

New Review Added

Our latest review is of Viivi Luik’s The Beauty of History translated from the Estonian by Hildi Hawkins. This review is written by Eric Dickens, who has done his fair share of translating from Estonian. Most recently he did Mati Unt’s Things in the Night for Dalkey Archive Press, and will be doing Unt’s ...

The Beauty of History

As a teenager, I watched on TV the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks. The year was 1968. The Soviet Union put an end to an attempt by a purportedly sovereign state to introduce a milder brand of Communism. Conscripts from the Baltic republics were also forced to take part in this blatant act of Soviet ...