Download or read book Herscht 07769 written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award winner’s breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian Bach The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area… Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.
Download or read book The World Goes On Third Edition written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in The New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with his own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
Download or read book The Last Wolf Herman written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, two novellas from the Hungarian master László Krasznahorkai—“one of the most mysterious artists now at work” (Colm Toíbín) The Last Wolf (translated by George Szirtes) is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell—it features a classic obsessed narrator, a man hired (by mistake) to write the true tale of the last wolf in Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another person, dragged about a cold foreign place, and appalled by a species’s end) is narrated—all in a single sentence—as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender. Herman (translated by John Batki), “a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion,” is asked to clear a forest’s last “noxious beasts.” He begins with great zeal, although in time he “suspects that maybe he was ‘on the wrong scent.’” Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game …
Download or read book Seiobo There Below written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize The latest novel from “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse” (Susan Sontag) Seiobo — a Japanese goddess — has a peach tree in her garden that blossoms once every three thousand years: its fruit brings immortality. In Seiobo There Below, we see her returning again and again to mortal realms, searching for a glimpse of perfection. Beauty, in Krasznahorkai’s new novel, reflects, however fleetingly, the sacred — even if we are mostly unable to bear it. Seiobo shows us an ancient Buddha being restored; Perugino managing his workshop; a Japanese Noh actor rehearsing; a fanatic of Baroque music lecturing a handful of old villagers; tourists intruding into the rituals of Japan’s most sacred shrine; a heron hunting.… Over these scenes and more — structured by the Fibonacci sequence — Seiobo hovers, watching it all.
Download or read book The Melancholy of Resistance written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
Download or read book Chasing Homer written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed—careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation … Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and—reaching out of the book proper—the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).
Download or read book War War written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize A novel of awesome beauty and power by the Hungarian master, Laszla Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he can commit suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all on the world-wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his moving far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of humanity, a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War and War is a short "prequel acting as a sequel," "Isaiah," which brings us to a dark bar, years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide. Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters), War and War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's prose "far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."
Download or read book Baron Wenckheim s Homecoming written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE "Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece" (The Millions); "Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad" (Publishers Weekly); "One of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature" (Paris Review); "Obsessive and visionary" (The New Yorker); "Genius" (The Baffler) At last, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
Download or read book Animalinside written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize Limited to 2,000 gorgeous copies, this richly illustrated, extraordinary novella was created in collaboration with the famed painter Max Neumann.
Download or read book Satantango written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Set in an isolated hamlet, Satantango unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance"--Page [i].
Download or read book Autobiographies of an Angel written by Gabor Schein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book In a Bucolic Land written by Szilárd Borbély and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving, posthumous collection of elegies and eclogues that meditate on nature, landscape, and history, by a great Hungarian poet. Szilárd Borbély spent his childhood in a tiny impoverished village in northeastern Hungary, where the archaic peasant world of Eastern Europe coexisted with the collectivist ideology of a new Communist state. Close to the Soviet border and far from any metropolitan center, the village was a world apart: life was harsh, monotonous, and often brutal, and the Borbélys, outsiders and “class enemies,” were shunned. In a Bucolic Land, Borbély’s final, posthumously published book of poems, combines autobiography, ethnography, classical mythology, and pastoral idyll in a remarkable central poetic sequence about the starkly precarious and yet strangely numinous liminal zone of his youth. This is framed by elegies for a teacher in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom László Krasznahorkai has said, “He was a poet—a great poet—who shatters us.”
Download or read book Marginalia on Casanova written by Mikl S. Szentkuthy and published by . This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions, and the sterility of philosophical systems.
Download or read book Spadework for a Palace Storybook ND Series written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others” and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.” Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian” with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street . . . I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office”), which itself is just one aspect of his also being “constantly conscious of his connectedness” to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Lowry” and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville, but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.” Driven to save that Palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but “people must be told the truth: there is no dualism in existence.” And his dream will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
Download or read book My Seven Lives written by Jana Juráňová and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Seven Lives is the English translation of the best-selling memoir of Slovak journalist Agneša Kalinová (1924–2014): Holocaust survivor, film critic, translator, and political prisoner. An oral history written with her colleague Jana Juráňová, My Seven Lives provides a window into Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the cultural evolution of Central and Eastern Europe. The conversational approach gives the book a relatable immediacy that vividly conveys the tone and temperament of Agneša, bringing out her lively personality and extraordinary ability to stay positive in the face of adversity. Each chapter reflects a distinct period of Agneša’s long and tumultuous life. Her idyllic childhood gives way to the rise of Nazism and restrictions of the anti-Jewish legislation, which led to deportations and her escape to Hungary, where she found refuge in a Budapest convent. Surviving the Holocaust, she returned to Slovakia and married writer Ján Ladislav Kalina. They embraced communism, and Agneša began her career as a journalist and film critic and became involved in the Prague Spring, ending with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Agneša and her husband lost their jobs and were imprisoned, which led to their decision to immigrate to West Germany. She found a new career as a political commentator for Radio Free Europe, and after decades of political oppression, Agneša lived to see the euphoric days of the Velvet Revolution and its freeing aftermath. My Seven Lives shows the impact of an often brutal twentieth century on the life of one remarkable individual. It’s a story of survival, perseverance, and ultimately triumph.
Download or read book The Great Chain of Unbeing written by Andrew Crumey and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Crumey’s novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey’s acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being. ‘The Great Chain of Unbeing is unboring, unusual and quite brilliant.’ Adam Roberts in The Literary Review 'It is a delightful introduction to his singularly riddling work - and in Crumeyesque style it is an intermezzo that doubles as an overture.' Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman The Great Chain of Unbeing, a book bursting with fertile fusions of ideas by this Scottish Borges .' The Sunday Herald
Download or read book The Manhattan Project written by László Krasznahorkai and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this literary diary, Krasznahorkai chronicles his attempts to fathom the life of Herman Melville, which is also the source of inspiration for his forthcoming novella Spadework for a Palace. Retracing Melville's steps, Krasznahorkai becomes engrossed in a web of chance encounters and coincidences that stretch from Manhattan to Nantucket, to London and to Berlin. Over the course of his wanderings, Krasznahorkai finds himself increasingly alienated from his present-day surroundings, drawn instead to the company of ghosts: the novelist Malcolm Lowry when he was down-and-out, the visionary architect Lebbeus Woods and of course - Melville himself. Ornan Rotem's photographic essay follows Krasznahorkai on his forays, both in space and time, creating a subtle portrait of a creative mind at work and the places he encounters."--Publisher
