History
Founded in 1996, The Prague Revue released seven issues through 2001, gaining a reputation for the highest level of professionalism and quality. One of the very few international journals to print translations, essays, poetry and prose side-by-side with dramatic scripts, The Prague Revue served an important function in drawing together diverse forms of literary production rarely encountered in a world of often partisan and narrowly focused periodicals.
According to Rebekah Bloyd, co-translator of Miroslav Holub’s The Rampage (Faber & Faber), The Prague Revue was “daring and original” in its devotion to the difficult task of cross-genre publishing.
From issue one (then called the Jáma Revue, named after the restaurant of its origin in 1995) with the fiction of Czech émigré writer Daniela Dražanová, the poems of Italian poet and editor Daniele Serafini and the art of Prague resident artist, Valera Nabokov, the revue established itself as a publication committed to publishing only the highest quality international literature.
Issue two featured a variety of outstanding writing in a scope unparalleled in the modern publishing world: Poetry, plays, stories and essays from The United States, the Czech Republic, Italy, Chile and Spain, including a translation of Migeul de Unamono’s “Mist,” a classic work of Spanish modernism little-known outside Spain, and “Fathers” by William Borden, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction award.
Issue three furthered The Prague Revue’s reputation as a top tier journal committed to quality and variety, featuring writers from countries as distant as Guam and Yemen, as well as a short story from internationally acclaimed Czech writer and publisher Arnošt Lustig, poetry from Ingram Merrill fellow Roger Weingarten, and the sketches of Merrilee Challiss, co-founder of the Prague-based international artist organization Etcetera.
In issue four we continued to represent new writing locally and worldwide in a variety of genres. This issue featured ten important Vermont poets, including Earl S. Braggs, winner of the 1992 Anhinga Poetry Prize, and David Mura, a National Poetry Series winner, as well as the first ever English translations of Otokar Březina (1868-1929), a major Czech symbolist poet and essayist many times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The pre-publication of his ‘Hidden History’ in The Prague Revue marked an important event in the reception of Czech literature internationally.
Issue five affirmed the journal’s status as Bohemia’s premier English-language literary publication with tributes to Bohumil Hrabal, new poems by Miroslav Holub, Justin Quinn, Roland Jooris, Giuseppe Conte, interviews with Julian Barnes and Andre du Bouchet, as well as photographs by John Minihan.
Issue six featured the poetry of Alice Friman, winner of the Consuelo Ford Award and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, both from the Poetry Society of America, the photography of Babora Štefanová, as well as a critical essay and a selection of writing from the “Generation of ’98,” a grouping of Spanish writers who together inspired their country’s second literary golden age in the early twentieth century. The Prague Post wrote of this issue, “The Prague Revue is strong in both prose and poetry… throughout this volume there is a wonderful thread of absence, loss, and indefinable longing and sense of transgression that holds the whole together… Neither academic and staid, nor overly experimental and difficult, the selections here are a joy to read. This is mature writing, from a mature magazine, for readers with grown-up sensibilities”.
Issue seven, hailed as “a delectable selection of literary diversions” by The Prague Post, was our final issue. It featured a selection of fourteen of the best contemporary Australian poets, a selection of cutting-edge writing from Slovenia, as well as “Plancius,” the only prose work by Konstantin Biebl, an original member of the Czech avant-garde group Devetsil, and then a founding member of the Czechoslovak Surrealists.
New issue coming June 2010!