From Mitteleuropa

Great article at The National on Penguin’s new Central European Classics. I’ll second Jeff and ask, why aren’t these being published in the U.S.?

This is not for lack of trying on the part of publishers. The past three decades have seen the birth and death of two first-rate series of books translating and gathering major texts of Central and Eastern European literature: Penguin’s Cold-War era Writers from the Other Europe series, which introduced English-speaking audiences to Danilo Kiš, Bohumil Hrabal, Tadeusz Konwicki and others; and a 13-volume series, published by the Central European University under the auspices of Timothy Garton Ash, of major Central European novels, including Deszo Kosztolányi’s Skylark and Bolesaw Prus’s The Doll, a Balzacian examination of late 19th-century Warsaw.

The CEU series completed its run last year; now, Simon Winder, the publisher of Penguin Press in the United Kingdom and himself a keen-eyed writer on matters of national culture (including the hilarious and disturbing Germania, whose title gestures at once towards the first Roman experience of the lands beyond the Rhine and towards Winder’s own mad and brilliant obsession with them) has launched a line of books that will, one hopes, illuminate this obscurity where its predecessors failed: the Central European Classics series.

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