It would be very hard to find anything more absurd and nonsensical than the Hungarian army of the Socialist era. Face and About-Face recounts the unique experience of the one-year compulsory army service that young men who had been admitted to college or university had to complete before starting their studies.

Recently deceased Hungarian prose writer Szilárd Rubin’s chef-d’oeuvre, The Chicken Game, is one of the undeservedly forgotten masterpieces of the Kádár era, re-published in Hungary in 2004.

Borbély's The Splendours of Death examines the author's personal tragedy through three of the most deeply ingrained narratives of the separation of the soul from the body in the European mind: the Christian tale of the martyrdom of Jesus, the Hellenic legend of Amor and Psyche, and Hassidic parables and Jewish prayers.

The piece translated here turns out to hinge loosely on King Matthias Corvinus, the most important and influential of Hungary’s rulers, and that other Matthias: Mátyás Rákosi, the leader whose misrule was the direct cause of the 1956 Revolution.

An attempt to come to terms with the death of a father who narrowly escaped the murders of Nazi-allied Hungary, this short novel is a chronicle of the fraught relationship between a Holocaust survivor and his son, as well as an attempt to work through a specific historical situation: the long-lasting, and notably patriarchal, “soft dictatorship” of Hungarian Communism.

Can someone define themselves freely? This is Kertész's great theme in this volume of essays. Collectivism, he states, far from being merely an aspect of totalitarian regimes, "is the most characteristic feature of the twentieth century… and it thoroughly sweeps away both the individual and individuality".

A linguist gets on the wrong plane and ends up in a foreign place where he finds himself surrounded by an utterly foreign world with obscure laws, a geographic location that must be kept a secret, and inhabitants whose indifference to all of this is utterly appalling. – A 1970 masterpiece by Ferenc Karinthy, translated into English for the first time.

Just as the author oscillates from his beloved cities, Budapest and Berlin, to the city of his imagination, Kandor, and then back again to a stone cottage located on a windswept plateau, his works also swing from literary prose to nouveau roman, only to return once more to essays and sociological observations.

Márai’s oeuvre was shaken out of its coma after 1989, when his works were first published in Hungary, then later went on to reach international success. By leaving Hungary in 1948, he made a decision that proved to be fateful from the point of view of his oeuvre’s future in his native land; at the same time, it was a natural extension of an exile intended to be a symbolically powerful, moral reminder. 

The rootedness of Borbély's poems in the literary forms of the Baroque and their religious orientation could work against their reception in the English-speaking literary world. Yet the theological stance always runs perilously close to the blasphemous, and the rigourous form is always at the point of decay.

Szindbad, the hauntingly charismatic, enduring traveler on journeys of the heart, may well be Krúdy’s most memorable fictional character. Kázmér Rezeda is the other major, “larger than life” figure in Krúdy’s oeuvre, appearing in six longer works, ending with the novel The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda, now being translated into English by John Batki.

Few works of literature have raised such a storm and caused such reverberations going way beyond their literary relevance as Esterházy’s Revised Edition. One of the greatest confessions of the age, the book recounts the story of the author finding out that his father had been an informer.

Reading stage plays and cookbooks requires a split state of consciousness. As a reader, one often wonders whether it would not be wiser to actually see the play and eat the food – for example, that "green herb soup / with smoked salmon stripes".

Móricz's novel Relations, recently published in English, is a career story in the Balzac vein, a kaleidoscopic image of the hierarchic society of a Hungarian small town, as well as a description of the "natural history" of corruption, the all-encompassing network of swindles.

Well-known and less-known Hungarian cultural figures of the female sex elaborate their notions of female body experience across various styles from short fiction to intellectual autobiography, memoir, blog-diary, life-narrative, or hip-hop text.