This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the lagacy of Proust and Mann. A BOOK OF MEMORIES is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family. A second memoir, alternatingwith the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account oftheir friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are inte- grated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

A superb collection of short stories, essays, and literary criticism from the great Hungarian writer The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, an artist whom critics easily compared to Robert Musil, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. Now, in Fire and Knowledge, we discover other aspects of Peter Nadas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed his country and all of Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree, as a moralist with a discerning eye for the crippling effects of deception and hypocrisy upon us all. In addition, Fire and Knowledge acquaints us more fully with Nadas's evolution as a writer of fiction, for it includes stories dating from the 1960s and 1970s, when he had to write in extremely stringent, even dangerous circumstances, as well as some from more recent years, since the publication of his major novels and the reintegration of Western and Eastern Europe. Here, in full, is a rich and rewarding compilation of works by one of our greatest living writers.

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.

First published in Hungary in 1986 after a five-year battle with censors, this is both a confessional autobiographical novel and psychological inquest into the repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past.

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.