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 Miklos scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).

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 idees 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."

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.

As one of the most prolific writers of Hungarian literature, Gyula Krudy provides us with a collection of articles that display his intimate knowledge of Hungarian society. Written during the 1910s, `20s and `30s, Krudy provides us with a wistful and nostalgic image of the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with portraits of the Habsburgs, culminating in first hand reports in 1916, from Vienna on the funeral of Emperor Francis Joseph I, and from Budapest on the coronation of Charles IV, the last king of Hungary. Krudy's reports follow the bloodless democratic revolution of 1918, the Karolyi government and the short lived Soviet Republic, and present cameos of the leading political figures of the day such as Ferenc Kossuth, Mihaly Karolyi and Bela Kun.

Ivan Mandy (1918-1995) has been called "the prose poet of Budapest," and this volume of short stories presents the first comprehensive collection of his work in English. His early oeuvre created an urban mythology full of picaresque characters inhabiting the seedier neighborhoods of the city: its flea-market stalls, second-run cinemas, and old-fashioned coffeehouses. The stories from the later decades of Mandy's life, often bordering on the absurd, introduce many autobiographical elements spun around the author's alter-ego, Janos Zsamboky, whose hapless adventures on a rare trip abroad constitute this group of stories, including "Postcard from London." Mandy's unique style at times borrows techniques from films and radio plays, his quirky cuts creating a flicker of images seen in the mind's eye. Memory and perception, time and place spin in narrative legerdemain that invites and rewards the reader's active participation.

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.'

Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. Focussing on the poor and dispossessed, these tales of love, food, death and sex are ironic and wise about the human condition and the futility of life, and display fully Krudy's wit and mastery of the form.

Detectives and criminals engage in a battle of wits across turn-of-the-20th century Europe from Odessa to Budapest.