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My Secret Life is the first translation into English of one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, Krisztina Tóth is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. The poems in My Secret Life were selected by her from three of her eleven published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems. Tóth is, and has been for several years, a major figure in Hungarian writing and, being a major figure with an important public voice, she has also been, and is now, subject to unrelenting attacks by the government-funded, government-supporting, gutter press. She has been self-exiled in England but is moving to Switzerland shortly. Originally attacked for suggesting that a couple of standard pieces of literature might be removed from the school syllabus and replaced by writing by living women, her life has become the subject of the sort of storm of defamation already practised on others perceived to be threatening the values of the government.
Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth's book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual's life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways--sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.
Krisztina Tóth's first substantial work in prose after four volumes of remarkable verse, consists of fifteen beautifully written and highly sensual short stories. Most are narrated with poetic intensity and intimacy from a young, unnamed female narrator's point of view. Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps and trips, or love and deceit in love, they are all are set against the backdrop of Hungary's socialist era in its declining years. The stories are carefully strung, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical 'lines', as in the title of the collection and the subtitle of the pieces. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small recounted here offer nuanced mirrorings of the female soul and linger long in the memory.
The essays in this volume focus on different prose and audiovisual narratives and their academic and cultural significance as seen in the twenty-first century. Their diverse interpretations of the novel as a genre provide a current academic overview on the variety of interpretive cultures and traditions. Divided into three sections, the book consciously takes an international perspective in both narrative theory and novel studies in order to deepen the reader’s understanding of classic American and European authors including Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, Jack London, J. M. Coetzee, and David Lodge. In addition, it also offers a profound contribution to international scholarship as it covers works of classic and contemporary Hungarian and Central European writers that have not been discussed in English before. With its unprecedented insights into the depth and diversity of narrative prose traditions, the book will inspire innovative approaches to the concept of the novel in European academic criticism today.
The Second Vatican Council is the single most influential event in the 20th century history of the Catholic Church. The book analyzes the relationship between the Council and the "Ostpolitik" of the Vatican through the history of the Hungarian presence at Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958, was a catalyst. The pope thought that his most urgent task was to renew contacts with the Church behind the iron curtain. Hungarian participation at the Council was also made possible by the new, pragmatic model in Hungarian church politics. After the crushing of the 1956 Revolution, churches in Hungary thought that the regime would last and were willing to compromise. Vatican II – in the perspective of Hungary – was not primarily an ecclesial event, but it remained closely joined to the negotiations between the Holy See and the Kádár regime: during the Council Hungary became the experimental laboratory of the Vatican's new eastern policy. Was it a Vatican decision or a Soviet instruction? Fejérdy suggests that it was a decision of the Holy See.
An anthology of the poets of Hungary who are the witnesses to the poetics of post-1989 Europe.
An unflinching narrative of family history in Hungary’s Jewish community and the nation’s deep complicity in the Holocaust Born in 1723 in a small German town, Johann Klarfeld is thirteen when his father dies. He is taken in by a kind Italian painter to live with him and his daughter in The Hague. But the daughter, beautiful and blind, has a secret. Two centuries later, Berta Jósza is born during World War II in a village in northern Hungary. The daughter of a police officer, Berta watches chaos unfold through her father’s eyes, from the plundering of the possessions of murdered Jews to the carnage of the 1956 Revolution. When she happens upon an enigmatic autobiography in a secondhand bookshop, she can’t shake the sense that she somehow knows the author. Lyrical and haunting, this is an unforgettable story about the spirit of history and the individual fates that make up the whole—the entwinements of the past and their unshakable hold on the present.
This timely book offers the first critical examination of World Bank policy reforms and initiatives during the past decade. The World Bank is viewed as one of the most powerful international organizations of our time. The authors critically analyze the influence of the institution’s policy and engagement during the past decade in a variety of issue areas, including human rights, domestic reform, and the environment. The World Bank and Governance delves into the bowels of the World Bank, exploring its organizational structure, professional culture and bureaucratic procedures, illustrating how these shape its engagement with an increasingly complex, diverse and challenging operational environment. The book includes chapters on two under-researched divisions of the World Bank: the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. Several illuminating country studies are also included, analyzing the World Bank's activities in Argentina, Bolivia, Lebanon, Hungary and Vietnam. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, development, politics and economics.
The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country’s cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors’ vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, th...
This text collects the poetry and fiction of 30 different authors from multiple languages, focusing on feelings of vulnerability and transposed sense of place