László Márton is one of the foremost contemporary Hungarian novelists, none of whose novels have been translated into English so far. The story he contributed to this issue, as sophisticated as it is hilarious, relates a fifteen-year-old would-be writer’s dilemmas in 70s Hungary. The story by Éva Berniczky, who lives in Uzhgorod, Ukraine, takes place in the present, yet it takes us into a desolate world populated by people vegetating around a depot somewhere in Transcarpathia, "this dark appendix of Europe", where one of the guards regularly lets his lover climb in through the gaps to steal some potatos, while the other is continually plugging the wall with anything he can find, and dreams that one day he might be able to obtain high-quality human material for the purpose... Critic János Szegő reviews Éva Berniczky’s novel Midwife Without Womb (2007) and Márton’s new collection of short stories What You Saw, What You Heard (2008). Of the six poems in this issue by Ádám Nádasdy, eminent poet as well as linguist and translator of Shakespeare's plays and Dante's Divina Commedia into Hungarian, one is also available online. In the "Personal" section, writer László Darvasi explains why the economic crisis currently rocking the world is not necessarily bad for Hungarian writers. Since publication will be out of question from now on, writers will no longer be subject to bad reviews,devote themselves to more useful occupations and live healthier. And in the end, they might even win a newly-founded literary prize called "I’ve Laid Down My Quill, Haven’t I". John Batki, the short story writer and translator of Hungarian literature living in Syracuse, New York, praises Gyula Krúdy as "Hungarian letters’ stellar contribution to world literature". In his essay, he depicts Krúdy as a chronicler of his times. Batki here focuses on Miklós Szemere, an iconic character who figures in several of Krúdy’s novels under the name of Eduard Alvinczi. In a section commemorating the 40th anniversary of the events of 1968 in Hungary, the writer György Dalos (several of whose novels have been translated into English, the latest being The Circumcision) recounts the story of how he was charged with Maoist conspiracy in Hungary in that memorable year. | 
