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This scathing, at times humorous, and always insightful memoir by exiled Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, provides one of the most poignant and human portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation in 1944 and the solidification of communist power in 1948. Both a fervent anti-fascist and anti-communist, Márai draws a vivid portrait of the Hungarian peasantry and middle-class during this period, while delivering a telling indictment of the communist system from which he fled. Witty, aphoristic and psychologically clear-sighted, this memoir depicts the tragedy and pathos of a crucial period in the post-war history of a nation which has been 'central' to both the communists and the post-communist history of our times.

Available for the first time in English, Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren's short story collection gives voice to lives shaped by repression, cruelty, and silence.

Moments from the Life of a Hedgehog and Other Stories introduces English-language readers to the unsettling, exacting fiction of Hungarian author Edina Szvoren. Disturbing yet deliberately modest, these stories evoke a claustrophobic world of compromise and quiet desperation: fractured families warped by history and habit, boarding schools and workplaces ruled by cruelty, and domestic interiors heavy with unspoken dread. Set in the final decades of Hungarian socialism and its immediate aftermath, Szvoren’s sharply observed miniatures are animated by ever-shifting perspectives—outsiders, misfits, refusers—struggling to make sense of lives largely beyond their control. Grotesque without excess, absurd without relief, Szvoren’s narrative voices overlap and collide in ways that recall Franz Kafka and István Örkény. Yet her work remains firmly grounded in the body: queasy, intimate, and insistently physical, with a feminist and existential charge. Among polyester ornaments and unbearable family encounters, these stories offer a powerful, understated testimony to the unheard—and the nearly unhearable.