Short stories
Is one supposed to be overjoyed if the best executioner in the country moves in next door? How does a mother feel if she is only allowed to meet her child for breastfeeding – a child who lives with the blind father? Is life with a tailor’s dummy preferable to life with flesh-and-blood people? Reading Edina Szvoren’s latest stories about inadequate relationships, absurd secrets, unspeakable pain and intense longing, the reader is overcome simultaneously by dread, sympathy, and surprise. Hopelessly at odds with our parents and children, longing to be with, or away from, our partners, we still somehow manage to get on in the world. We are foreigners in our own stories, yet this is where we have to set up home. Will we ever get used to all this actually fitting together? Edina Szvoren’s stories show the claustrophobic familiarity of our relationships, with sparks of a dark humour and hints of the absurd.
These are human gestures; this is not hell”
European Union Prize for Literature 2015 for her second book of short stories
On the shortlist of the Aegon Award 2016, for outstanding literary achievement
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1432 53 4
2015, hard cover with jacket
192 pages, 120×197 mm
2990 HUF
Excerpt on hlo.hu
English, German and French excerpts available
Magvető Rights 
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