Krisztina Tóth's first substantial work in prose after four volumes of remarkable verse, consists of fifteen beautifully written and highly sensual short stories. Most are narrated with poetic intensity and intimacy from a young, unnamed female narrator's point of view. Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps and trips, or love and deceit in love, they are all are set against the backdrop of Hungary's socialist era in its declining years. The stories are carefully strung, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical 'lines', as in the title of the collection and the subtitle of the pieces. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small recounted here offer nuanced 'mirrorings' of the female soul and linger long in the memory.

Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Toth's book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual's life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways--sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.

This first major gathering of the younger poets of Hungary witnesses to the poetics of a new post-1989 Europe. The poetics are still in the making but important poets appear and develop. They are writers whose mature work has been produced in the new social, psychological and political circumstances. They include major women poets such as Anna T. Szabo, and Krisztina Toth as well as highly acclaimed figures like Janos Terey and Andras Gerevich. The translators are chiefly poets of the same generation - Owen Sheers, Antony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky, whose work sits alongside writers long associated with the translation of Hungarian poetry: George Gomori, Clive Wilmer, Peter Zollman and the editor, George Szirtes.