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A poet's memoir of his mother that flows backwards through time, through a tumultuous period of European history - a tender and yet unsparing autobiographical journey. **RADIO 4's BOOK OF THE WEEK FROM 15 March 2021** "A truly remarkable book . . . fiercely compelling" EDMUND DE WAAL *WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE JEWISH WINGATE PRIZE* "I've read no memoir that moved me more" MIRANDA SEYMOUR "The writing is always scrupulous . . . [a] compelling memoir" BLAKE MORRISON "Beautifully written and utterly compelling" Sunday Times "An original, probingly thoughtful memoir" EVA HOFFMANN In July 1975, George Szirtes' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance, on her w...
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender centre of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, 'is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.' And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'
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Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize The body is the `bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of `minimenta' after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of ...
Translated by George Szirtes From the winner of the Man Booker International Prize In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
Offering an introduction to the playfulness of words, this is a collection of 50 riddles in verse for children, featuring many everyday topics such as household objects, natural phenomena, traffic lights and electricity.
George Szirtes, a Hungarian poet, now lives and writes in England. His first book, The Slant Door, was a joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for 1980.
Now in paperback, a transcendent and wide-ranging collection of stories by László Krasznahorkai: "a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful."--Marina Warner, announcing the Booker International Prize
George Szirtes is a leading figure in contemporary poetry in England and in Hungary, the country of his birth. His poems explore - in a wide variety of complex, skilfully handled forms - his origins, his life, and his critical engagements with works by other poets and artists. They offer powerful and moving meditations on the roles and functions of the poet in the modern world. "Reading George Szirtes" offers the first sustained analysis of Szirtes' work, mapping his development chronologically and thematically, and paying close attention to form and technique in its analysis of each poem.Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by los...