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.

Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies intertwined with passages about major life changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it, reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in his earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in 1956. These are wound around poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval, and life in contemporary England as tracked by a series of dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have been inhabiting. Covid poems run through the collection like a thread holding the book - and indeed the condition of England - together. The thread embraces the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about residual Jewishness experienced as a dialogue with the poet's late father, as well as a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland. The book ends on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo 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.'

Now in paperback, Satantango, the novel that inspired Bela Tarr's classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel 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. "Their world," in the words of the renowned translator George Szirtes is "rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death." Into this world comes, it seems, a messiah...

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize War & War begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. 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 commits suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all out onto the world wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his move far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of people in a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War & 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 & War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's prose far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.

Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As Laszlo 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...' The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. '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.'

In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar.

In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear a forest's last 'noxious beasts.' Herman begins with great zeal, although in time he switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game... In Herman II, the same events are related from the perspective of strange visitors to the region, a group of hyper-sexualised aristocrats who interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman...

These intense, perfect novellas, full of Krasznhorkai's signature sense of foreboding and dark irony, are perfect examples of his craft.

The UEA Creative Writing MA presents its annual selection of new young poets. Founded in 1992, students and tutors on the course have included Owen Sheers, Kathy Simmonds, Hugo Williams and Anthony Thwaite.

"The tiger growls, its eyes ablaze, but we too have our tiger ways, we too can pad through the dark wood of the cosmic neighbourhood." Leap with hares, call out to the sun, run with the wind, pull silly faces with monkeys, watch out for the bear in the bathroom and meet a burping princess! A fantastic new collection for younger children from a prize-winning poet. These poems are perfect for curious young minds, ready for adventures.

This short collection of poems considers that necessity and the obstacles in its way: exile, distance, haunting, identity, despair, killing... the list goes on.

The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it. Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other's eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other's and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself. At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet's father. The room constricts and glows.The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive - if it survives at all - on its broken patterns. Poetry Book Society Choice.

George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It is published on his 60th birthday at the same time as the first critical study of his work, "Reading George Szirtes" by John Sears. Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; and, humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter", "Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel", all included here.

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. George Szirtes' three lectures form an arc on the nature of historical knowledge in the poem. 'Our knowledge' says Elizabeth Bishop in 'At the Fishhouses', 'is historical, flowing and flown.' The sea in her poem is so cold it burns hand and tongue, a parodox explored in his first lecture, 'Cold dark deep and absolutely clear: poetic knowledge as uncertainty'. Beginning with this understanding of knowledge, his second lecture, 'Life is Elsewhere: knowing in opposition', shifts to notions of historical responsibility, especially as perceived by poets in the West at the time of the Cold War. Szirtes considers questions of betrayal and fidelity and the role of irony and quietism. In his third lecture, 'Flowing and flown: in the world of superfluous knowledge', Szirtes seeks exemplars and connections in works by George Seferis, Derek Mahon and poets of Eastern Europe from the period immediately before 1989 as well as briefly afterwards, to enquire into the nature of repression, returning to Bishop's story 'In the Village' for its conclusion, where 'The hammer echoes with the icy black sea. Cold, dark deep and absolutely clear' ending with Bishop's affirming cry: 'Oh beautiful sound, strike again!'