Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays

This volume collects shorter pieces from 1962 to 2000. Essays and stories in one volume can strike Americans as an uneasy fit, but Nadas's essays are so distinctively associative that they have the force of stories. Judging from these short works, a childhood in Stalinist Budapest left Nadas with a healthy respect for the secret, the unspoken. In the title essay, a multiple arson (someone set fire to the four corners of Hungary) leads an impromptu outbreak of candor on the television.

Contains:

The great Christmas killing

Liar, cheater

The Bible

Homecoming

Little Alex

On Thomas Mann's diaries

The lamb

Hamlet is free

Lady Klára's house

Melancholy

Vivisection

A tale of fire and knowledge

Family picture in Purple Dusk

Our poor, poor Sascha Anderson

Work song

Minotaur

Fate and technique

Meeting God

Parasitic systems

At the muddy shore of appearances

The citizen of the world and the he-goat

Clogged pain

Way

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, Péter Nádas. Now, in Fire and Knowledge, a superb collection of short stories, essays, and literary criticism, we discover other aspects of Nádas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, and as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree. Here, in full, is a rich and rewarding compilation of brilliantly original, touching, witty, and thought-provoking works by one of our greatest living writers.

• Author
• Péter Nádas, Imre Goldstein

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 391

• Publisher
• Farrar Straus Giroux

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-374-29964-4

• EAN
• 9780374299644

• Genres
• fiction, essays, literature

• Release date
• 2007