Literary / Hungarian literature

The Sinistra Zone

by Adam Bodor & Paul Olchvary

Lyrical, surreal, and yet unsettlingly realistic, The Sinistra Zone swims in the totalitarian backwaters of Eastern Europe

Entering a weird, remote hamlet, Andrei calls himself “a simple wayfarer,” but he...

Fiasco

by Imre Kertesz & Tim Wilkinson

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country...

The Pathseeker

by Imre Kertesz & Tim Wilkinson

"There's no such thing as chance...only injustice."

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of...

War & War

by László|Szirtes, George Krasznahorkai

A novel of awesome beauty and power by the Hungarian master, Laszla Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.

War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New Directions,...

The Melancholy of Resistance

by László||| Krasznahorkai

A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial,...

Metropole

by Ferenc Karinthy & George Szirtes

On his way to a linguists' conference in Helsinki, Budai finds himself in a strange city where he can't understand a word anyone says. One claustrophobic day blurs into another as he desperately struggles to...

Satantango

by László|Szirtes, George Krasznahorkai

At long last, twenty-five years after the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai burst onto the scene with his first novel, Satantango dances into English in a beautiful translation by George Szirtes. Already...

Parallel Stories

by Péter Nádas & Imre Goldstein

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011  In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a...

Kornel Esti

by Desz Kosztolányi & Bernard Adams

A great masterpiece never before available in English, Kornél Esti is the wild final book by a Hungarian genius.Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures...

The Book of Fathers

by Miklos Vamos & Peter Sherwood

When in 1705 Kornell Csillag's grandfather returns destitute to his native Hungary from exile, he happens across a gold fob-watch gleaming in the mud. The shipwrecked fortunes of the Csillag family suddenly...

Fatelessness

by Imre Kertesz & Tim Wilkinson

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t...

Kaddish for an Unborn Child

by Imre Kertesz & Tim Wilkinson

The first word in this mesmerizing novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is “No.” It is how the novel’s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks...

If Dogs Could Talk

by Vilmos Csányi & Richard E. Quandt

Every dog owner knows intuitively that there's something special about the high degree of mutual understanding and empathy that exists between humans and their proverbial best friends. Now, an internationally...

Casanova in Bolzano

by Sandor Marai

Another rediscovered masterpiece from the Hungarian novelist whose Embers became an international bestseller—a sensuous, suspenseful, aphoristic novel about the world’s most notorious seducer and the encounter...