Category: Uncategorized

with illustrations by Zsuzsi Medve

‘Once upon a time there was a car. The car belonged to the Old Miss, and it was shiny and clean inside and out, because Miss liked things to be tidy and clean, and she liked her old car too.’ This is how Aliz Mosonyi’s latest stories start—for young and old, drivers and pedestrians, travellers and armchair explorers. You’ll come across drive-in cinemas, a postal worker, a queen, a porcelain dog and a real one, and everything else the Old Miss encounters on journeys in her old car.

Aliz Mosonyi’s gentle humour is loved by children and adults alike. We recommend the car stories for children aged 3 and over. They could also be an excellent introduction to independent reading for beginners of five or six years old.

For children ages 3 to 6

…these few pages are perfect for a bedtime story, for tired parents, for little ones who want to laugh, travel, and have adventures, and Zsuzsi Medve’s drawings with their colours and scents make them even more lifelike.” Magyar Narancs

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1432 98 5
2015, hard cover
64 pages, 240×210 mm
2990 HUF

English excerpts available

Aliz Mosonyi

Novel

This novel is an extraordinary story about an unforgettable woman – a story that took place in the Budapest of the 1940s, full of glamour as well as mortal dangers. In chapters alternating between the past and the present – the grey, boring and eventless Budapest of the 1970s – the author tells the story of Baby Vadnai, a beautiful, rich and fashionable young woman, and the investigations of Dobrovich, a budding writer and member of a ‘tribe’ of young intellectuals in Communist Hungary. Dobrovich and a friend, Doxa, the legendary loiterer, madman and visionary of the ‘tribe,’ suspect they might be brothers, and Dobrovich starts to make investigations about their father. A story of passionate love and hate unfolds, with the milieu of Budapest in the 1940s – the siege of Budapest, the persecution of Jews and the glittering social life of the high classes – in the background. Baby Vadnai is a historical novel in which both wartime and Communist Budapest are powerfully evoked.

Not many writers are better placed to describe the atmosphere of the 1970s than Géza Bereményi, author of the lyrics of Tamás Cseh, the signature singer of that era. The hopeless boredom of the 1970s when any action seemed pointless is contrasted to the remarkable story of Baby Vadnai and his admirers and lovers – a story which speaks with demonic power about the irrationality of love, about desire transformed into burning hate, and which also shows mercilessly how people act in wartime. As the adult sons are searching for a mother and a father, they also shed light on how we repeat, in our character and choices, the fate of our ancestors. This pulsing and exciting novel, much of which is based on reality, gives fascinating answers to these questions and others.

 A love story in wartime Budapest as seen from the bleak 1970s

Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 3122 3
2013, hard cover with jacket
296 pages, 123 × 184 mm
2990 HUF

Excerpt on hlo.hu

Géza Bereményi

Novel

Besides being the story of a brave coming out in 1990s Hungary, Incognito is a remarkable debut of a promising writer, a novel which traces the inner development of an individual.

Incognito is a gripping account of how a young boy, a keen soccer-player who lives in the outskirts of Budapest discovers the stranger – the Other – in his own personality and body. The novel tells the story of how Tibor finds his alter ego, Noémi, in himself, and how he manages to accept, and make people around him accept, this newly-found identity. Besides being the story of a brave coming out in 1990s Hungary, Incognito is a remarkable debut of a promising writer, a novel which traces the inner development of an individual. Tibor Noé Kiss has found a melancholy rhythm, a sensitive and gentle yet powerful prose, and an original perspective to match his topic, the growth of a young man, and the woman in him.

While Incognito is specifically about the life of a transgender person in society, his interactions and sexuality, the temptation of suicide, the desire to be known and loved, and the painful awareness of the impossibility of it, it is also an account of the pain and solitude of our human condition, which happens to be concentrated here in the protagonist’s gender insecurity.

I’m a transvestite, there’s nothing special about this. That is what I should answer when they ask me, but they don’t ask me even though they would love to ask me, and I would love to answer, too… I want to make it clear. I’m a transvestite, but not in that sense. There is nothing special about this. I’m a transvestite, but not that kind.”

I think nobody has ever crossed that pedestrian bridge in a woman’s suit. Only me. That’s what I call a unique experience.”

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1434 80 4
2016, hard cover with jacket
148 pages, 125×197 mm
2690 HUF

Rights sold
English, New Europe Books
Finnish, Kustantamo
Polish, Książkowe Klimaty
Slovenian, Lambda

English and French excerpts available

Tibor Noé Kiss

Travelogue

The inclination to travel: to set off to faraway lands, to leave behind the familiar world, one’s home – only to look for what is familiar in the place that attracted us precisely because of its strangeness and otherness. Rather than visiting glamorous cities, Noémi Kiss visits the peripheries of Eastern Europe: Bukovina, Backa and Galicia. As she is open-minded enough to allow for otherness, she returns from her trips with more than just herself. Her Eastern Europe is sensitive, diverse, full of contradictions and enduring. It is her attention that sets off the historical lustre of shabby places, opening larger vistas than the present state of dilapidation and scarcity. And it is her openness that makes us believe that Ukraine is home not only to the most beautiful and the ugliest woman in the world but the middle of the world as well.

“She is sufficiently disrespectful, a free soul but never arrogant – not the one to know more than the other person or the story that a village or a hill has to tell. She neither judges nor ‘surveys’ from above – instead of poising on any sort of intellectual pinnacle, she is up to her neck in the whirl of it all… Although thoroughly intellectual, she is not inclined to intellectualizing, while her remarks are intelligent and witty. This is an original spirit, sometimes piqued, often funny, always intelligent and feminine, ready to blush, ready to pale.” (Viktória Radics, Magyar Narancs)

Trips to the peripheries of Eastern Europe

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1426 99 1
2009, hard cover with jacket
184 pages, 123×184 mm
2490 HUF

Rights sold
German, Europa Verlag

English excerpts available

Noémi Kiss

Novel

What does it mean to give birth, and how does it feel to be born? This exquisite book by Noémi Kiss is subtitled ‘foetal prose.’ A rhythmic succession of narratives, monologues, notes and meditations describes the whole process of birth, from artificial insemination to labour, ending with the first birthday of the twins. Some of the stories are told from the perspective of the mother, others from that of the twins. Birth is present in this book as a physiological reality and spiritual miracle, with its various stages of hoping, pain and helplessness, and the hard-earned moments when mother and child manage to find a common language. As a result of a cosmic yet banal process, ‘I’ and ‘you’ merge into ‘we.’ Confronting a number of taboos about pregnancy and child-rearing, the book of Noémi Kiss is liberating reading.

Mother of Twins describes the happy and liberating yet at times harrowing months of pregnancy and the first year after the birth of the children with extraordinary power and lyricism.” (Orsolya Kolozsi, Könyvesblog)

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1430 81 3
2013, hard cover with jacket
108 pages, 123×184 mm
1990 HUF

Excerpt on hlo.hu

English and German excerpts available

Noémi Kiss