Organized on the occasion of the BOOK WORLD PRAGUE 2013, the 19 international book fair and literary festival, with financial support from the U.S. Embassy Prague.
Part I
RAYMOND CARVER: WHY DON’T YOU DANCE?
Raymond Carver (1938–1988) worked at a sawmill while editing a literary magazine. He wrote stories included in anthologies of best American stories of the year while selling cinema playbills in Hollywood. He won prestigious literary prizes but was dismissed from his job. An expert on and admirer of Chekhov, Flaubert and many other European artists, Carver was four times hospitalized because of his acute alcoholism. A master of short prose, he considered himself first and foremost a poet. He remains the most important American writer of the 1980s.
Performers: Jiří Lábus, Emil Viklický
PART II
AMERICAN POETRY AND JAZZ
Josef Jařab takes us through modern American poetry to the musical accompaniment of Emil Viklický.
Other performers: Stephan Delbos, Gabriela Míčová, Dana Poláková
We know that the cradle of jazz is early-twentieth-century America and its birthplace New Orleans. In the 1920s jazz flew out of Harlem, Chicago, Memphis and St. Louis to become a world phenomenon. In Europe jazz made a major contribution to the advance of modernist art. In time it brought together black and white musicians from America and elsewhere. The dazzling stars of jazz got poets singing in English (as well as Black English and other languages) all over the world; this is the case today as it was in the heyday of jazz.
