New Books

Zsuzsa Rakovszky: Sign of the Times

Münster, the 1530s. Tensions are growing between Catholics and Protestants. As emotions are running high, radical Anabaptists seize the city hall, and proclaim that Münster, under their rule, is the ‘New Jerusalem.’ More

Krisztina Tóth: The Monkey’s Eyes

Krisztina Tóth’s latest novel is set in a bleak city in the bleakest of times. The scene is an isolated country that has recently been through a devastating civil war. The new government rules with an iron hand and society is fatally divided. More

Réka Mán-Várhegyi: Sketch for Something Else

Magdi has uncontrollable bursts of anger, Ági has 10,000 followers, Györgyi has a husband with a career in politics, Anikó is having difficulties writing her novel. Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s book consists of four long short-stories offering a glimpse into the everyday life of four middle-class Hungarian women in their forties in the time of the pandemic. More

Judit Kováts: Children of the Tatra Mountains

Judit Kováts’s previous book, Expelled, concerned the fate of the German minorities expelled from Slovakia after World War II, seen through the story of Lilli Hartmann, a girl from Kežmarok (Hungarian Késmárk, German Käsmark). Children of the Tatra Mountains finds Lilli on a liner on her way to the United States with her new family: her husband, an adopted son, and a book of legends of the Tatras. More

Boldizsár Fehér: No Big Deal

How can we dodge wasting time chatting on the street with someone we barely know? What should we do if we don’t like a present we have been given? Why does the barber always cut our hair shorter than we want? More

Krisztián Grecsó: Something Folksy

In Grecsó’s new collection, many of the stories are born of the tension and confusion resulting from the meeting of two worlds. In some of the stories, these two worlds are the city and the village; in others, it is the present and the past. And, importantly, there is the world of the healthy and that of the sick. The severe illness from which the author has only recently recovered is a theme or motif in many of the stories. More

Edina Szvoren: Sentences on Wonderment

Könyv: Mondatok a csodálkozásról (Szvoren Edina)

Edina Szvoren’s fifth collection of distinctive short stories maintains the uniformly high standard of writing that we have come to expect from her. This volume nonetheless differs from the previous ones in that here the keynote of its unmistakably grotesque, absurd style is more playful, more humorous, and more light-hearted than in her earlier work. More

Gábor Schein: Oh, Rhinoceros

Gábor Schein’s new book is an entertainment: it imagines what would happen were the history of Europe and western civilization told by rhinoceroses. The story begins with Europa being carried away not by a bull but by a rhino, and ends with the anti-rhino media spreading the news that the source of the epidemic – patient zero, as it were – was an Indian rhinoceros that was not prepared to quarantine. More

Tibor Noé Kiss: Unfathomable Landscape

Following a car crash a young woman in her twenties falls into a coma. When he is not by her sickbed her father spends his time investigating the causes of the accident. On an estate near the motorway there live a brother and sister: though in adjacent rooms, they might as well be on two different continents. These four characters are the protagonists of the book and at the same time the story’s narrators. More