Ferenc Barnás: Another Death (excerpt from the novel)

Barnás has found an authentic viewpoint and a language that is unique in contemporary fiction to trace that "other life" underneath the life of each of us.

Literary lovers: Miklós Radnóti and Fanni Gyarmati

Their love was not an idyll without tensions as the textbooks would have it, yet that is precisely what made it an indissoluble bond, still alive today. Fanni Gyarmati, who was 100 last year, is still living in the apartment that the couple used to share.

The chronicler of writers’ love stories

Initially, writing about the love life of Hungarian writers and poets was a mere pastime. But before he knew it, Krisztián Nyáry's Facebook posts became so popular that within a year he gained 23 thousand followers.

The word ‘Jew’ casts a long shadow

An interview with Gábor T. Szántó about his new book Threesome, a novel of missing tradition, and the reconciliation of freedom and the modern way of life.

Gábor T. Szántó: Threesome (Excerpt from the novel)

A master, a student and a woman are trying to extricate themselves from the dead end situations of their life in typical present-day Budapest scenes. Can we step out of the shadow of the past, or will we carry it within ourselves forever?

Pen name: P. Howard. Jenő Rejtő died 70 years ago

Jenő Rejtő is the only Hungarian pulp fiction writer appreciated by literary historians. He died seventy years ago today.

Poems of the month - Sándor Weöres: Eternal Moment; Eternity

A bather's thigh brushed by skimming fish, a lizard's leap, bird-wings’ caress. Moments leaning out of time, shaped out of the air. Like a poem; like a festive season. We wish all our readers a happy holiday.

Teenagers in focus – classic/popular Shakespeare?

A case study of present-day Hungarian reception

Shakespeare is an appealing cultural commodity in present-day Hungary. Even today, however, teenagers mostly face an archival and canonical view of Shakespeare’s plays, though there has been a shift towards a more up-to-date appreciation.

Those half-dead sentences. Miklós Mészöly: Death of an Athlete

The female companion of a recently deceased athlete is asked to record her memories of her lover, but she is unable to write the "official" narrative that the Communist regime seeks from her.

"I like being an outsider". Interview with Noémi Szécsi

"I insist on moving freely between categories, on keeping every door and window open. This is my notion of freedom as a writer." - Interview with Noémi Szécsi, the author of Finno-Ugrian Vampire, recently published in English.

Miklós Mészöly's Death of an Athlete now out in English

Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) influenced just about all major authors writing in Hungarian today. For all that, until now essentially nothing by him has been published in English.

Péter Nádas has donated his photographic oeuvre to a Swiss museum

Nádas is regarded as among the greatest writers alive, but he is much less known as a photographer. Yet he started his career as a photojournalist, and continued to take pictures into the years 2000.

Pilinszky and Holocaust poetry anthology in the TLS

The Times Literary Supplement of 9 November 2012 features a review on two volumes of Hungarian poetry in English translation: an anthology of Hungarian poets on the Holocaust, and a book of János Pilinszky's poems.

Literature and censorship in the Kádár era in Hungary

This paper examines reader's reports in the archives of a Hungarian publishing house, and provides a glimpse into the elaborate ritual of tacit negotiations and the exercise of self-censorship in the Kádár era.