Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens...

In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips, and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias—long thought dead—returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune...

Beauty, in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's new novel, reflects, however fleeting, the sacred - even if we are mostly unable to bear it. In Seiobo There Below we see the Japanese goddess Seiobo returning to mortal realms in search of perfection. An ancient Buddha being restored; the Italian renaissance painter Perugino managing his workshop; a Japanese Noh actor rehearsing; a fanatic of...

The International Booker Award winner's breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and graffiti vandalism. 'Propulsive and revelatory' The New York Times 'A work of genius' 5-star review, Telegraph Gentle giant Florian Herscht is an orphan, adopted by a neo-Nazi who has apprenticed him as a graffiti cleaner. The Boss, a Bach fanatic, is enraged that someone is spraying wolf...

Shortlisted 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...

The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him. This novel by International Booker Prize winner László Krasznahorkai—perhaps his most serene and poetic...

In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar. In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear a forest's last 'noxious beasts.'...

Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists. – Paris Review Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the culmination of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's remarkable...

War & War begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform, Korim is on the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. From here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an...

Known for his brilliantly dark fictional visions, László Krasznahorkai is one of the most respected European writers of his generation and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Here, he brings us on a journey through China at the dawn of the new millennium. On the precipice of its emergence as a global power, China is experiencing cataclysms...

Enough About Angels by László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025, begins in an intriguing manner: "It may seem to you that I am standing here and speaking into a microphone, but I'm not." The author delivers his 2025 Nobel Lecture to a captivated audience in Stockholm. Yet in his mind, he imagines himself pacing the room—more...

Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle Entering the Madness of Others and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed, this high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fuelled by the idées fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name—Mr Herman Melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too...

Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's classes in particle physics for two years, he is convinced that global cataclysm is imminent. And so he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, hoping to convince her of the imminent danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Written in one cascading sentence with the...

In 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 and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was...