On the 30th anniversary of the political transition we scrutinized the changes in various branches of culture. Whether the most fundamental change is to be seen in literature is far from certain, nonetheless, it is literature that is able – when it is able – to immediately grasp with words the small and great changes in life, the fate of a country and its citizens, and the phenomena of the world. Our overview is superficial by nature, the topic would merit a volume of essays. AN INTERVIEW BY ÁGNES MERÉNYI More
Krasznahorkai is no stranger to the depiction of seclusion and solitude as the necessary (and sometimes almost sufficient) component of creative work, and to the bitter romanticism of how extremely lonesome everyone is in this world. A REVIEW BY JÓZSEF NAGYGÉCI KOVÁCS. More
Susan Faludi’s book In the Darkroom is a grand voyage around identity. She writes about personal, family and national identity, about sexual and gender identity, about religious and political affiliations. The subject matter was provided by her own father, the renowned photographer and retoucher and his sex reassignment surgery. How did a historian of photography read Faludi’s book? BY KÁROLY KINCSES. More
It is possible that God does not exist at all, but nevertheless, or for that very reason, one can believe in him, one can pray to him, and, as many will testify from experience, one must fear him. (And according to Voltaire, as we all know, if He didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.) BY JÓZSEF SÁNTHA More
There is tension between the two words of the title. Flowers are associated with beauty, gobbling belongs to ugliness. But is the greed with which one gobbles flowers beautiful or ugly? And can one live on gobbling petals? An almost seven hundred page long tour de force is built on this contradiction. BY TAMÁS TARJÁN. More
The booklet, already remarkable in itself as an object, contains illustrated essays originally published on litera.hu, and is a real bonus for the author. BY PÉTER POGRÁNYI. More
Jelenkor publishing house presents us with yet another sophisticated looking volume, On a Fantastic Journey, which is a collection of Péter Nádas’s seven essays that were published in journals or read openly in the past years, all of them busying around social-political issues. BY GÖKHAN AYHAN. More
