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About a quarter of a way through this book, just out in America, I realized that I'd been overlooking a major international writer.

And over the decades, Eastern Europe has continued to turn out writers whose work possesses an existential depth and an inventiveness that can make English language fiction look flimsy.Ī striking example of this is Olga Tokarczuk, a 56-year-old literary star in her native Poland who frankly I'd never even heard of until a few months ago when her book "Flights" won the Man Booker International Prize. Stripped of the peculiar glamour of oppression, they were no longer sexy. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bottom seemed to fall out of the market for writers from the other Europe as a series edited by Philip Roth once dubbed them. They were political dissidents whose work mattered.

Not only were they good, their careers came with a compelling backstory. JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: During the Cold War, Eastern European writers were a very big deal in the West. "Flights" is now being published in America by Riverhead Books, and our critic-at-large John Powers says it's a revelation. Earlier this year the Man Booker International Prize, given for the best book of the year translated into English, was given to "Flights," a work of fiction by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.