PRI’s The World published an interview today with Aleksandar Hemon, editor of Dalkey Archive’s new Best European Fiction 2010. Among the incredibly rich array of work included in the anthology is an excerpt from Michał Witkowski’s acclaimed novel Lubiewo (soon to be published in the UK as Lovetown by Portobello Books—the publisher that also just scored Herta Müller’s remarkable latest novel Atemschaukel). Witkowski’s piece, which is one of the few passages in his book to work as an autonomous short story, concerns the abject and almost comical fortunes of a teenaged, Slovak male prostitute in Vienna—an experience that is emblematic of the fraught class dynamic between post-communist Eastern and Western Europe, but that like much of the book also has a documentary or biographical source. (Full disclosure: I’m the translator.) The anthology—which owes its life to the industry of Dalkey Archive editor Jeremy Davies—was reviewed, briefly, in the Wall Street Journal; Hemon was also recently interviewed about it on the New York Times books blog; and he will appear at Symphony Space in New York next month for a reading/performance of stories from the book.
ü
Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog 
An English review of Lubiewo, written by myself, can be found on the Dublin Review of Books site.