György Faludy's Happy Days in Hell

Penguin Modern Classics has just released Faludy’s autobiography My Happy Days in Hell, an elegant tale celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. The book was first published in English in London in 1962, anticipating Alexander Solzhenitsin's Gulag Archipelago by more than a decade. It covers a morally confusing period when many otherwise decent souls were driven into the arms of Communism by their outrage at the initial triumph of murderous Nazi tyranny.

Believing with doubt

Zsuzsa Takács: Adoration of the Body—India

The new volume of poetry by Zsuzsa Takács has found a captivating framework for the writing of the uncertainty of belief: the letters and diaries of Mother Teresa, which formulate her struggle between belief and unbelief.

The freedom of silence

Sándor Márai: The Unabridged Diary, 1952-53

After three and a half years spent as an expatriate in Italy, Márai decided to relocate to New York along with his wife and their adopted son. The decision was extremely painful and one which, in all probability, determined the remaining 37 years of his life.

The breath of freedom

Péter Esterházy: Not Art

Esterházy’s talent goes way beyond postmodernist textual plays and is indeed capable of shedding light into the unknown nooks and corners of the human soul, the dwelling-place of trivial yet mysterious things like the relationship of mother and son, the metaphysics of rooting or the freedom of fiction against the tyranny of facts.  

A lemur in the army

László Garaczi: Face and About-Face

The yet unborn child

Szilárd Borbély: Legends of the transhuman

What would happen if, in our modern secularized society, our narratives of death and life regained the gravity of a previous age? Borbély draws upon an ever-present and yet undefined genre: that of the female conversational narrative as it has appeared for decades in the popular press and lately in Internet chatrooms. 

Good person wanted

Miklós Vajda: Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame

Accurate, succinct, and at the same time rich in detail, a shrewd but not cold analysis, elegant, distant, but not dispassionate, ironic, but not sarcastic – this portrait, and part autobiography, is a triumph of proportion and good taste. But most of all it is touching. And beautiful.

"A single whispered evocation"

The "Hassidic Sequences" of Szilárd Borbély

Urban myths and realities

Gergely Nagy: Angst: The handbook of the urban guerilla

Angst features a young cartoonist from Budapest and tracks his rapid rise, gradual burnout and ultimate disintegration. In the background of the events we read subtle observations and interpretations of the hidden life of present-day Budapest, its new and ever renewed character.

Untrendy places

Noémi Kiss: The Tattered Jewel Box

At last here is someone who, instead of musing over the wonders of Berlin, London and New York, takes the trouble to visit godforsaken parts of Eastern Europe such as Bukovina, Galicia or Backa – places in Romania, Ukraine or Serbia. The tattered jewel box rather than the glamorous one.