Hungarian List – serie

In The Glance of the Medusa, Laszo F. Foeldenyi offers a mesmerizing examination of the rich history of European culture through the lens of mythology and philosophy. Embracing the best traditions of essay writing, this volume invites readers on a spiritual and intellectual adventure. The seven essays bear testimony to Foeldenyi's encyclopedic knowledge and ask whether it is possible to overcome our fear of passing away. In doing so, they illuminate moments of mystical experience viewed in a historical perspective while inviting readers to engage with such moments in the present by immersing themselves into the process of reading and thinking. Rather than providing firm answers to burning questions, The Glance of the Medusa highlights the limits of definition, conjuring up situations in which Man partakes of unutterable experiences-such as passion, pleasure, fear, poetry, or disgust-suggesting that moments of ecstasy cannot be pinned down or captured, only drawn a little closer.

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás’s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man’s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others’ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him—each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.  When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing—by weaving an imagined tale of L.’s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing?A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervor, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape.

Set in the 1970s and ’80s, The Hangman’s House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa’s latest novel depicts everyday life under the brutal communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, referred to by the narrator as an unnamed “one-eared hangman.” Ceaușescu is omnipresent throughout the story—in portraits in classrooms and schoolbooks, in the empty food stores, in TV programs, in obligatory Party demonstrations. Most insidiously, he is present in the dreams and nightmares of common people, who, in this cruel period of history, become cruel to one another, just like the dictator.  Our narrator, a teenage “Girl,” observes life through tangled, almost interminable sentences, trying to understand and process the many questions in her life: why her family is falling apart; why her mother has three jobs; why her father becomes an alcoholic; why her grandmother dreams of “Hungarian times”; and, most troubling, why there is persecution all around. Brutal though the times are, Girl’s narration is far from a mere indictment. It is suffused with love, tenderness and irony.  Written by a woman and featuring a young woman narrator, The Hangman's House focuses intently on how women play the principal roles in holding together the resilient fabric of society. Evocative of the celebrated wry humor that distinguishes the best of Hungarian literature, Tompa’s novel is a tour de force that will introduce a brilliant writer to English-language readers.

Iván Mándy (1918–1995) has been called “the prose poet of Budapest,” and this volume of short stories presents the first comprehensive collection of his work in English. His early oeuvre created an urban mythology full of picaresque characters inhabiting the seedier neighborhoods of the city: its flea-market stalls, second-run cinemas, and old-fashioned coffeehouses. The stories from the later decades of Mándy’s life, often bordering on the absurd, introduce many autobiographical elements spun around the author’s alter-ego, János Zsámboky, whose hapless adventures on a rare trip abroad constitute this group of stories, including “Postcard from London.” Mándy’s unique style at times borrows techniques from films and radio plays, his quirky cuts creating a flicker of images seen in the mind’s eye. Memory and perception, time and place spin in narrative legerdemain that invites and rewards the reader’s active participation.

A novel of growing up a Hungarian in Romania under Communism. In the novel Story of a Stammer, Gabor Vida asks a fundamental question: Where does stammering come from? In the process of answering this question, he discovers that an entire historical period and an entire world have been stammering, too. Through Vida's eyes, we see that stammering comprises all the lies accumulated over time and over generations because nobody had ever articulated what they felt or thought, nor done what they really wanted. Nobody, Vida shows, had ever told the truth. Describing life in the 1970s and '80s under Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu's authoritarian regime, Vida writes with disarming honesty, breaking taboos and chronicling the ways in which tyranny and exploitation seep into family relationships. The novel charts the first two decades of a young Hungarian man's life in Romania, telling a story of coming to terms with a stammer, loneliness, and an unstimulating environment where religion, alcoholism, and suicide are the most common escape strategies. A Bildungsroman, a novel about Transylvania, a chronicle of minority life, a sociological analysis of cultural identity, and ultimately a deeply personal account of a historical era, Story of a Stammer is a major contribution to contemporary Hungarian literature-an unfailingly serious yet humorously delightful witness to a turbulent period in recent history.

An inventive collection of stories by one of the most prominent and acclaimed writers in Hungary today. The Birth of Emma K., a collection of twelve short stories rich with magic, introduces English-language readers to one of the most vibrant and original voices in contemporary Hungarian literature. Zsolt Lang's new collection opens with God sitting on a bench looking over Budapest; later, a Hungarian man who has stumbled into a Romanian music theory class suddenly finds he is able to speak expertly about Hungarian composer Bela Bartok-and in perfect Romanian; and even later, against all odds, the embryo of Emma fights for her future life from within the womb. Drifting between melancholic and witty, in sentences that are winding, subtle, and colloquial, Lang's stories are deeply rooted in Transylvanian culture and history. Reminiscent of the best writings of Irish modernist masters such as Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, The Birth of Emma K. presents an unforgettable collage of human nature.

A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece that reflects on fragmented lives.  Born in 1963, Szilárd Borbély emerged as one of the most important poets of post-communist Europe, exploring the themes of grief, memory, and trauma in his critically acclaimed work. Following the murder of his mother during a burglary in 2000, and the subsequent breakdown and death of his father, Borbély suffered from post-traumatic depression and tragically ended his own life in 2014.Among the manuscripts that Borbély left behind was Kafka’s Son, a fragmentary work, rendered still more fragmented through the author’s death. Through a series of haunting passages that explore early twentieth-century Prague, including the ruins of the ancient Jewish ghetto during the time of its demolition, Borbély inscribes the story of Franz Kafka and his father onto the city. We are used to hearing from Franz; here Hermann Kafka is also given a voice. “The son,” he tells us, “is the life of the father. The father is the death of the son.” By extension, then, this book is also an indirect telling of the story of Borbély and his father, and about sons and fathers in the Habsburg empire and the culture of brutality that defined Eastern Europe.A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece, Kafka’s Son now appears in English in award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet’s sensitive translation, a fragmentary yet iridescent work inviting us to reflect on our fragmented lives.

A rich, layered narrative that explores the indomitable human spirit against the backdrop of Romania’s complex history in the 1950s and ’60s.A rural area not far from the city of Cluj-Napoca, a former Hungarian province that has been part of Romania since 1920. World War II has ended and the region is under the firm clasp of Stalinist collectivization. In the atmospheric village of Kolozsvár, Omertà unfolds a riveting tale through four poignant perspectives, each peeling back the layers of its central characters’ lives against the backdrop of a tumultuous Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century.Kali, a peasant woman, escapes an abusive marriage to embark on a transformative journey to Kolozsvár, seeking refuge and purpose. She is employed as a maid by Vilmos, a reluctant Communist Party member with an unwavering dedication to his garden. As Vilmos’s botanical brilliance attracts the state’s attention, a clash between personal desires and political obligations ensues. Annush, the third narrator, a lovestruck teenager, becomes entangled in a complex web of emotions, grappling with love, loss, and the evolving landscape of her homeland. The tale deepens with Eleonora, who, seeking solace in a monastery, becomes a casualty of political purges and the suppression of religious faith under Romania’s oppressive regime.In this epic novel, Romanian-born Hungarian author Andrea Tompa skillfully intertwines these tales, shedding light on the injustices and corruption of a regime that sought to extinguish cultural identities. The lives of Kali, Vilmos, Annush, and Eleonora weave a tapestry of love, resilience, the virtue of roses, and the quiet strength required to endure in the face of political turmoil.

This novel seamlessly blends the intellectual musings of Thomas Mann with a Hungarian folktale exploring the boundaries of reality and fantasy.In this captivating and whimsical novel, the German novelist and critic Thomas Mann is visiting his tailor, Klaus, to be measured for a new overcoat, but his mind is full of thoughts of his new novel and meditations on the state of Europe after World War I. His tailor, though, entraps him in wily dialogue with mysterious claims about angels threading a strand of their hair through all of God’s creations. Mann becomes further entangled with this provocative artisan through a mysterious dream in which he is asked to draft a contract for the Rights of Devils.  At the same time, the impoverished mother of five-year-old Marci Tamás, living in a tiny Hungarian village, struggles to find the little boy a winter coat. Marci has stopped growing, so the coat she finds—belonging to a former circus dwarf—should suffice for life. Only the coat has a life of its own, as Marci soon finds out. That’s not all: he discovers a mysterious little white elephant in the family courtyard, which no one else can see. Determined to save the family’s three piglets from being slaughtered, he enlists this strange creature in a daring collective escape.  Written by one of Hungary’s most audacious literary voices, Thomas Mann’s Overcoat is at once a homage to the great German novelist as well as an Ars Poetica that embraces excess, whimsy, and folk poetry and refuses the strictures of realism.

A lecturer’s descent into psychological chaos unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of 1990s Budapest.In Other Death, we are thrown into the chaotic life of a forty-year-old university lecturer who is experiencing a sudden, complete psychological and existential breakdown. Afternoons disappear and years chop and change in confusion as he wanders the streets searching for work. Homelessness, alcoholism, and hate are on the rise in 1990s Budapest as symptoms of the regime change. Images flash up from other lives: a Boer pointing a shotgun in Johannesburg, bodies heaped up in the downtown area, a Volkswagen campervan parked by an empty phone box in Switzerland. As he encounters new and historic traumas embedded in the lives and the buildings around him, the unnamed narrator struggles to grasp any coherent identity. It’s only when he starts to work as a gallery attendant, observing the interactions between viewer and artwork, light and space, that he embarks on the slow healing routine towards clarity.In Barnás’s semi-autobiographical novel, meditations on trauma and urban space, image and observation, and spiritual friendships echo the writings of W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Like Vertigo meets The Bell Jar, the magnetic language of Other Death draws the reader into the murky workings of a mind severely afflicted.

A ground-breaking anthology showcasing the voices of ten remarkable Hungarian women poets for English-language readers.Under a Pannonian Sky is a landmark anthology that brings the voices of ten extraordinary Hungarian women poets to English readers. Edited by award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet, this collection spans generations, offering a rare glimpse into the rich and complex world of Hungarian poetry. The anthology features renowned poets like Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, whose works have been celebrated internationally, alongside voices such as Gizella Hervay and Magda Székely, who are introduced in-depth to English readers for the first time. Through original and lyrical language, these poets chronicle the traumas of World War II, the Hungarian Holocaust, and the societal upheavals of the 1989 regime change, exploring themes of identity and resilience. Their poems reflect deeply personal confrontations with their roles as citizens, daughters, mothers, and witnesses to turbulent and often disorienting historical epochs.Under a Pannonian Sky is an essential collection for readers seeking to discover the richness of Hungarian poetry and its profound engagement with the personal and political landscapes of the twentieth century and beyond.

A collection of stories from a Hungarian writer that treats relationships and love in contemporary life.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 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 trio of darkly elegant, women-centric novellas from a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature.  Mrs Kleofas’ Rooster brings together three captivating novellas by Gyula Krúdy, originally written in the 1920s and now available in English for the first time. Each story centers on a woman protagonist: a timeless adventuress, a resilient single mother, and a seductive Budapest femme fatale, respectively. In the title novella, a roguish narrator listens to the thrilling life story of an ageless, mysterious woman whose journey takes her from a childhood of suffering to a career as a cunning accomplice in daring schemes. The next story, NN, follows the life of a steadfast single mother, Juliska, amid the rhythms of village life. In Autumn Meeting, Krudy’s sharp wit unfolds through Rizili, a charming yet ruthless socialite who leads a suspended jockey on an intoxicating night through Budapest’s City Park.