Prisoner of Urga, László Krasznahorkai’s mind-bending, legendary third novel—and his first book set in Asia—is only now, decades after its 1992 publication, coming into EnglishIn this book of journeys—to enlightenment? to a way out of a terrible life crisis? to the Celestial Empire? to a meeting with the gods?—a holy fool of a character named László Krasznahorkai travels for days and days across the Gobi Desert by train. Past vistas of empty vastness worth...

'One of the most mysterious artists now at work' Colm Tóibín'The contemporary master of the apocalypse' Susan SontagUnder a cold sun blazing in a blinding blue sky, a train pulls away from Urga and out into the Gobi desert, headed for Beijing. Aboard the train sits a traveller who, amid a Dantean spiritual crisis and dogged by questions of the most profound variety, has been compelled to run away to the heart of China. His journey,...

Gyula Krúdy is a marvelous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where urbane sophistication can erupt without warning into passion and madness.In Sunflower young Eveline leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of h...

FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018A 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...

WINNER OF THE 2025 NOBEL PRIZEA classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrationsIn 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 ...

Ranging through a history of changing empires, monarchies, countries, regimes, religions, down to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names, Hungary is always there, through the Millennium celebrations over a century ago, amid the exhausted last days of communism, and even under today’s “illiberal democracy”.“A vast, sprawling novel linking a meticulously plotted jewel theft in 1896 Budapest to the impulsive crime of passion that sinks the plotters – and to the history of moder...

This collection of exploratory pieces, short stories, and reflections was originally published in Zurich in 1936. It was the last volume Robert Musil published before his sudden death in 1942. Musil had begun to fathom the impossibility of com- pleting his monumental masterpiece The Man Without Qualities and this volume reveals a radically different aspect of his work. Musil observes a fly’s tragic struggle with flypaper, the laughter of a horse; he peers through microscopes and telescopes...

A novel built from beginnings...You buy a book called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and sit down to read. The story stops mid-sentence. When you find another copy, it contains a different opening. Each attempt to continue leads to a new narrative that breaks off just as it gathers momentum.As the Reader, you set out to track down the missing text. Along the way you encounter Ludmilla, another reader pursuing the same vanished book. What follow...

Mercedes Lackey's magical Elemental Masters series recasts familiar fairy tales in a richly-imagined alternate Victorian worldNinette Dupond was a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. She had been very lucky—if she had not been pretty, and a natural dancer, she could only have become what her mother had been: a washerwoman.But Ninette’s good luck ended the day that the lead dancer sprained her ankle and Ninette was chosen to dance her part at a matinee. Her ...

An NYRB Classics OriginalWinner of the 2014 PEN Translation PrizeWinner of the 2014 Read Russia PrizeThe stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the auto...

'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'.When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with del...

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itse...