Description

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Never before translated short stories—“stark and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle)—by the legendary genius Ágota Kristóf

Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf’s short—sometimes very short—stories, which she selected herself, translated by the peerless Chris Andrews. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof’s short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere.

The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader’s mind, Kristof’s penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.

About the Author

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Ágota Kristóf (1935-2011) was born in Csikvánd, Hungary. Her first novel, The Notebook, won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages.

The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.

Praise For…

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Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission—one might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form.
— Jennifer Krasinski - The New Yorker

Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.
— Missouri Williams - The Nation

Pure genius.
— Max Porter

Many of Kristóf’s stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail...have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal—that is fierce and distinctive.
— Kirkus Reviews