Krisztina Tóth - Böcker

Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth’s book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual’s life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.

A unique collection of five contemporary plays from 21st-century Hungary, translated into English for the first time. Written by some of Hungary’s most highly prolific and commercially successful dramatic voices, these plays are being produced in their native Hungary by theatres that do not adhere to Viktor Orbán's values and offer a counterpoint to the commercial Boulevard Theatre scene of Budapest.Translator and theatre-maker Szilvi Naray champions these unheard voices through her performable and dramatically engaging translations. The plays are aimed at micro-budget productions and offer a special opportunity for students and small theatre companies alike to engage with these witty, politically irreverent plays, finally in English.Each of the selected playwrights has been in direct conflict with the Hungarian government and has been demonised by the state-controlled press. The five plays are thematically threaded together by their common use of strong leading female protagonists with an overarching theme of the family unit. Through the edited introduction the themes and feminine translation strategy discusses how the plays offer a microcosmic lens for understanding the paradox that today’s Hungary exemplifies, making this a necessary study into the world of contemporary Hungary through drama.

A unique collection of five contemporary plays from 21st-century Hungary, translated into English for the first time. Written by some of Hungary’s most highly prolific and commercially successful dramatic voices, these plays are being produced in their native Hungary by theatres that do not adhere to Viktor Orbán's values and offer a counterpoint to the commercial Boulevard Theatre scene of Budapest.Translator and theatre-maker Szilvi Naray champions these unheard voices through her performable and dramatically engaging translations. The plays are aimed at micro-budget productions and offer a special opportunity for students and small theatre companies alike to engage with these witty, politically irreverent plays, finally in English.Each of the selected playwrights has been in direct conflict with the Hungarian government and has been demonised by the state-controlled press. The five plays are thematically threaded together by their common use of strong leading female protagonists with an overarching theme of the family unit. Through the edited introduction the themes and feminine translation strategy discusses how the plays offer a microcosmic lens for understanding the paradox that today’s Hungary exemplifies, making this a necessary study into the world of contemporary Hungary through drama.

Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English.My Secret Life is the first book of Krisztina Tóth’s poetry in English translation. The poems were selected by her from three of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.‘Her work has the nervous energy of the times but is shaped by a deep and disciplined intelligence. Her subjects are invariably human. They are concerned with love, family, friendship, loss, and a kind of existential disaffection. Tragic in one sense but ever inventive, full of life’s minute yet highly resonant particulars, they seem to extend into an almost cinematic narrative about the cruelties of factory farming, murder, ageing, the treatment of women as sex toys and death itself. She is a bravura formalist when she needs to be. Her vigour and scope are enormous.’ – George Szirtes'Poems pulsating with sensual power, deeply painful poems, about everything that is regarded as very personal.[…] Not with her themes, not with her tone does she prove to be an innovator. In this respect she remains faithful to the great, intellectual current of Hungarian poetry, a current that is not very old. It can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century […] Krisztina Tóth proves herself to be an innovator within this important tradition through the stirring rhythm of her poems. She wraps her persona, ready for any change of form, in rhythm. In other words, she makes herself impersonal in the most personal of ways and ready for confessions that are relevant for everyone; through her changing tone, through her surprises. […] Krisztina Tóth's composition sets her apart from all the others. She has the strength of a buffalo and the weightlessness of a butterfly.' – Péter Nádas, afterword to BarcodeReviewing Krisztina Tóth’s short story collection Pixel under the title ‘The Hungarian Author who foresaw the future of Nationalism’, Stephanie Newman wrote: ‘Tóth muses that generations of humans, like bobbing needles, are “seaming together the fraying layers of the past and the present”. Their countries of origin don’t matter; neither do their religions, genders, or ethnicities. What Tóth creates in Pixel is emblematic of Europe as she sees it: a place in which “everything is sewn together while the thread itself is invisible”.’

A powerful collection of sixteen unsettling stories that delve into the hidden traumas of everyday life.  “Every home is a different story,” says one narrator in White Wolf while looking for her own childhood home. Every unhappy home is unhappy in its own way—and so are the stories in Krisztina Tóth’s new volume, in which the writer’s voice is darker and more radical than ever.These are stories of trauma, oppression, submission, exclusion, stigma, and violence. Many of them tell of childhood abuses, unpunished crimes, lost children—suffering that goes without punishment, apology, and forgiveness. Her mostly nameless heroes are everywhere around us, stepping into the same elevator, running behind us on the staircase. Many of them are so wounded or tormented that they behave in strange ways. In White Wolf, Tóth observes these characters with acute sensitivity and attentiveness to detail.

The prize-winning poet and translator George Szirtes has selected work from eleven of Hungary's leading young poets for this bi-lingual anthology, the publication of which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This is the first major anthology of Hungarian poetry of this generation. Contributors include: István Kemény (b.1961), Szilárd Borbély (b.1964), András Imreh (b.1966), Mónika Mesterházi (b.1967), Krisztina Tóth (b.1967), Virág Erdos (b.1968), Jáos Térey (b.1970), G. István László (b.1972) and Anna T Szabó (b.1972).Plus UK poets/translators Owen Sheers, Anthony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky."... if a lively and different way with words and imagination and risk is to be brought into original English writing, here's a fine push towards it."David Hart, StrideGeorge Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His first book, The Slant Door was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. He has published several books and won various other prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005.