Halloween has always been an inspiring time for poets. Here are a few classic Halloween poems and a few unlikely ones as well.

The Paris Review has released all of its author interviews free on its website. Stein’s radical decision to do so puts more than 50 years of interviews with leading novelists, poets and critics – an invaluable resource – at the disposal of online readers.

Part II of The Prague Post’s interview with award-winning Czech author Jáchym Topol.

Read about Jachym Topol’s latest novel Chladnou Zemí, Cold Land, for which he won the Jaroslav Seifert Prize, in the Oct. 13 issue of The Prague Post. Topol sat down with The Prague Post recently at a cafe in Smíchov to discuss the Seifert Prize, his approach to history, and his place in Czech literature.

If you have read any contemporary Czech novels in English, you have probably read the words of American translator Alex Zucker. Zucker has translated more than a dozen works of contemporary Czech literature, most recently Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník. Zucker sat down with The Prague Post recently on his first return to Prague in several years.

If you have read any contemporary Czech novels in English, you have probably read the words of American translator Alex Zucker. Zucker has translated more than a dozen books of contemporary Czech literature, most recently Case Closed by Patrik Ourednik. Zucker sat down with The Prague Post recently on his first return to Prague in several years.

Catherine Hales seems calmly aware of what is at stake in great poetry. Hazard or Fall is a book of poems which risk failure to explore the limits of language and its ability to describe and capture perceptions. The best poems in the book are all the more successful for what they risk, and finally achieve: fresh language which expresses the chaos of life in the 21st century, but does not sacrifice human warmth and the sure intelligence of tradition.

A quick roundup of this week’s most interesting literary links.

No English translation of Chladnou Zemi has been published, but that may soon change. Translator Alex Zucker told The Prague Post that Chladnou Zemi is the book he would most like to translate, although a UK publisher has already purchased the rights to the book, and will have the final say in who translates it, and when.

Prague is a great city, and the poetry now being written here – perhaps it is more accurate to say the poetry the city is now allowing – is befittingly supra-cultural, written in both Czech and English, and intended for a multi-cultural audience.