And as usual, we digress a bit, talking smack about Milan Kundera and praising Robert Coover, both for and

We also talk about summer vacations, because, well, we’re both going to be gone for the next couple weeks, so expect podcast #10 in mid-July.

This week’s featured song is by Foster the People, a KCRW favorite who produces insanely infectious songs. (“Pumped Up Kicks” and “Houdini” fall into this category as well.)

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Incredibly, he returned to Prague after the 1968 uprising was put down:

Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. “I organised a reading the week after we got back,” he says. “I invited about 45 guests, which I’d worked out was the most I could get into our living room. And I prepared meatballs, ‘Klima-balls’ as they came to be known. There was some wine, and somebody read something that was newly written. That was how it went on, every week. I remember Havel read two of his new plays; Kundera, who was still in Prague at that point, came and read some things.”

After about a year, Klima’s friend Ludvik Vaculik (the author of A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator) brought along a man from Ostrava to one of the gatherings, a writer who had spent a year in prison. The man, who later committed suicide, had signed an agreement in prison to work with the secret police and he passed on the names of everyone who was there, and pictures were taken of people coming in and out. “So from that point,” Klima says, “we were known.”

Klima, Vaculik (we’re doing a reprint edition of his The Guinea Pigs next year), Havel, and Kundera all in one place, reading together. No doubt Skvorecky attended these readings too. That’s just too much.

Vaculik has also written a sort of memoir of that time, and of the years when they published each other’s work in samidzat editions, which is really fascinating. Just reading about all of these amazing writers working together in such close proximity is something.

Maybe we’ll publish that one too…

This Prize is for the best fiction and nonfiction translations from French into English over the past year and comes with a $10,000 case award. The shortlist was loaded with great books and translators, all of whom were incredibly deserving.

In the end though, the were Linda Coverdale for her translation of Jean Echenoz’s Ravel, and Linda Asher for her translation of Milan Kundera’s The Curtain. Congratulations to both Lindas!