Away go the books on the Hapsburgs. The Baedekers for Austria and France, the sale catalogues for auctions in Paris, marked up with the prices realised for family furniture, the books on fashion, on post-war Tokyo, the stack    of Gazette de Beaux Arts. The section of books on Freud and the shelves of Musil, Zweig, Roth will stay,of course, but may have to move up. [...]

From a short story appearing here for the first time in English Translated by Jessica Cohen More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and [...]

There are some documents that, as a conscientious writer, I am glad to have read only after the publication of a novel, even though they are extremely interesting and contain potentially useful information. In the first part of this decade, when I was researching the first half of the twentieth- century for the history of the time and of my [...]

Nation-building and the construction of Europe

Why Brno? A place, many would say, distinguished only by its lack of distinction, set at the very heart of Europe but always in the shadow of its mighty neighbour Vienna or its more distant cousin, Prague. A capital of course, but only a regional capital, of South Moravia. The writer Jirí Kratochvil, a native of the place, makes it [...]

Hello, there, After a long, weirdly warm Jerusalem winter spent in the presence of heavily armed soldiers and suspicious security guards — many Fridays a large white surveillance zeppelin hovered over town, staring down on noontime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and making a macabre mockery of the festive atmosphere that usually attends the launch of a hot-air balloon — [...]