Daniela Fischerová is one of the leading Czech writers of the generation born after the Second World War, whose members began to be published only after the Prague Spring ended in 1968. She is best known for her plays, which have been staged around the world, including in the United States. She is also known for her children's books, mostly recently LENKA AND NELKA, OR AHA! (1994), and for her radio plays and screenplays. FINGERS POINTING SOMEWHERE ELSE (Catbird Press , forthcoming) will be her first book to appear in English. “A Letter to President Eisenhower” appears in DAYLIGHT IN NIGHTCLUB INFERNO: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation, selected by Elena Lappin (Catbird Press, 1-800-360-2391).

Spencer Holst has published two collections of stories, THE LANGUAGE OF CATS and SPENCER HOLST STORIES, and for three decades has been storyteller par excellence of New York's literary cafés. He has received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an award from the Foundation for Performing Arts. He lives in New York City with his wife, the visual artist Beate Wheeler. THE ZEBRA STORYTELLER, stories and prose works including Holst's unfinished baseball epic, “The Institute of the Foul Ball,” is published by Station Hill Press. Station Hill Press will bring out his newest collection, BRILLIANT SILENCE, composed of miniature fictions, later this year.

Kirin Narayan is the author of STORYTELLERS, SAINTS AND SCOUNDRELS: Folk narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching; MONDAYS ON THE DARK NIGHT OF THE MOON: Himalayan Foothill Folktales; and LOVE, STARS, AND ALL THAT, a novel. She teaches anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Among other awards, she has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, and the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore.

Stella Snead was born in England in 1910. She studied with Ozenfant and Henry Moore and for fifteen years was known as a Surrealist painter whose works were said to be “amongst the most interesting of the strong surrealist movement in [England] in the 1930s and 1940s.” During that period she had eleven solo exhibitions. She migrated to America, living in New York, then Taos; and in 1956, began photography, while traveling in the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Greenland. She lived in India for eleven years. She has exhibited in a great number of galleries, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kodak House, London; Lincoln Center, New York; Donnell Library, New York; Gallery Chemould, Bombay. Photographs by her are in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the International Center of Photography, and Harvard University Archive. She has published eight books: DROWNING CAN BE FUN? A Nonsense Book (Pont La Vue Press, New York, 1992); ANIMALS IN FOUR WORLDS: SCULPTURES FROM INDIA, texts by Wendy Doniger and George Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 1989); BEACH PATTERNS (Clarkson Potter, 1975); SHIVA’S PIGEONS, text by Rumer Godden (Chatto and Windus, London/Viking Press, NY, 1972); CHILDREN OF INDIA (Lothrop, Lee & Shephard, NY, 1971); THE TALKATIVE BEASTS (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1969); SEVEN SEVEN (Folder Editions, NY, 1965); RUINS IN JUNGLES (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1962). She lives in New York. A retrospective of her existing paintings is being shown at CFM Gallery, 112 Greene St., New York, from April 8 to May 9, 1999; a catalog is available from the gallery.

Eleanor Ross Taylor was born in 1920 in North Carolina and was married to the fiction writer Peter Taylor. LATE LEISURE (LSU Press) is her fifth book of poems, the others being WILDERNESS OF LADIES, intro. Randall Jarrell (MacDowell & Obolensky); WELCOME EUMENIDES, intro. Richard Howard (Geo. Braziller); SELECTED POEMS (Palaemon Press); DAYS GOING/DAYS COMING BACK (Univ. of Utah Press). In 1998 she received the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America and, earlier, was awarded a fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Pavel Zoubok is a private art dealer in New York City specializing in twentieth century collage and assemblage. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and Hunter College (MA), he has done extensive research into the history of collage and has written an unpublished study of the Czech poet and collagist Jiri Kolar. He regularly presents exhibitions of contemporary mixed-media artists at Mary Delahoyd Gallery in New York and is gallery representative for Stella Snead's work in photography and photo-collage. For information about upcoming exhibitions and gallery artists please call (212) 675-9619.

&&&

In Memorium

MARION BOYARS

(1928-1999)

A Conversation with Marion Boyars appeared in
Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 3

Our friend and contributor Benjamin Cheever’s new novel FAMOUS AFTER DEATH is just published by Crown.

“If you buy one book in 1999, let it be this one. There’s more knowledge, more humor, more wisdom packed into the pages of this novel than available in the entire self-help section of your average megastore. Within a month of purchasing this volume, most men experience a significant increase in the thickness and lustrousness of the hair which grows sometimes on the top of the scalp. Read this book carefully and your wife or husband or significant other, will fall in love anew. Or barring that, they’ll fall in love for the first time. That’s right. With you. Everybody who reads this book carefully loses weight. Sure to be an international bestseller, FAMOUS AFTER DEATH is a must read. Benjamin Cheever is a great writer indeed. He’s also a wonderful, wonderful man.”

                                                                              —Benjamin Cheever

Moshe Benarroch, whose poems appeared in Archipelago Vol. 2, No. 1, has published a new book of poems with Yaron Golan, 3 Burla Street, Tel Aviv, Israel. The volume, in Hebrew, is SHIRAT SOF HAOLAM (The Poetry of the End of the World), and costs $15, p/p. A selection of his work appears on-line in Ygrassil.

A remarkable work by our friend and contributor María Negroni, ISLANDIA, is to be published this year by Station Hill Press. A dual-language edition, translated by Anne Twitty, ISLANDIA “is written in alternating prose and verse sections. Its prose tells of a race of exiled Nordic heroes who have lived for generations on an island, while the sophisticated verses of the author's own persona (as a poet exiled in present-day New York City) speak to the condition of a woman's life in urban America. Apparently polar aspects of the work’s historical/contemporary, remote/local, mythical/ personal, traditional saga/modern poetry’s approach each other, but never quite touch,across a chasm of mutually reinforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. María Negroni is the celebrated Argentinean author of six books of verse and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for 1994.” Excerpts from her long sequence EL VIAJE DE LA NOCHE/NIGHT JOURNEY appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 1. Her LA JAULA BAJO EL TRAPO/CAGE UNDER COVER, also tr. by Anne Twitty, appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 2, No. 4.

contents