Fiction. Peter Nadas, born in 1942 in Budapest, is the author of A BOOK OF MEMORIES and THE END OF A FAMILY STORY, which have won him wide acclaim as the outstanding Hungarian writer of his time. A LOVELY TALE OF PHOTOGRAPHY is an hallucinatory novella about a female photographer who is suffering from an undetermined illness. Confined to a sanitorium, where she is surrounded by a cast of stock characters speaking various languages, she is made to confront a reality other than that framed by her camera.

Fiction. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. An enquiry into the nature of eroticism, an unflinching exploration of the physical and psychological aspects of love bordering on sexual mysticism, OUT OF ONESELF is a collection of two novellas that expore two different epochs in Hungarian history through the sexual relationships of its characters, who are passionately searching for a way out of their hapless and sinful world. Each story revolves around a seductive, alluring actress, whose erotic attraction is turned into mythic proportion by the aura of the stage or the screen in scenes of such sexual explicitness and obsessiveness in its description that one is reminded of Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. "There is not the slightest doubt that what Andras Palyi has been doing is nothing short of tempting God. It is impossible to read him without a feeling of reverential dread. He blasphemes, he challenges and wages war against God"--Peter Nadas.

REVIEW IN BOOKLIST
by Brend

The hallucinatory, unforgettable account of a moment-or an eternity-in an uncertain love affair
The man has actually come to tell his lover that he wants to leave her, but as soon as he walks in he realizes he won't be able to tell her. The woman rolls a joint. They smoke it. And as they drift into another state of mind, he approaches the border zones between being and nonbeing, between living and imagining, or is it between life and death?
From the acclaimed author of "A Book of Memories" we now have this unsettling and strangely beautiful exploration of the impossibility of love. The mysterious musicality and physical intensity of the narration will be familiar to readers of Nadas's other fiction, but "Love "is a radical new departure.