Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. Now imprisoned, he begins to recount his involvement in the surveillance, torture and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon the young boy's aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive element, before they turned their attentions to his father. Once the plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime's chosen end…

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses — or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author’s return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. Fiasco as Imre Kertész himself has said, “is fiction founded on reality” — a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertész’ fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization — ours — that made Auschwitz possible From the Trade Paperback edition

The first word in this mesmerizing novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is “No.” It is how the novel’s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child. It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two “no”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertész’s narrator addresses the child he couldn’t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice. From the Trade Paperback edition

Opowieść młodego chłopca, Żyda z Budapesztu, który spędził rok w niemieckich obozach koncentracyjnych, Oświęcimiu i Buchenwaldzie. Pozbawiona patosu relacja piętnastolatka, który z naiwnością stara się przystosować do wymagań swych ciemiężycieli, odsłania mechanizmy kryjące się za zbrodniami ubiegłego stulecia

Schreiben, um zu überleben, um weiterleben zu können - nach Buchenwald, nach Auschwitz. Imre Kertész zählt zu den wenigen Autoren, denen Literatur nach Auschwitz noch möglich ist. Sein "Roman eines Schicksallosen" gilt als eines der wichtigsten Zeugnisse des Holocaust. Gemeinsam mit dem Jugendlichen György wird der Hörer in die Welt der Vernichtungslager gestoßen, lebt und erlebt die Naivität des Beteiligten, der seinem kindlichen Leben entrissen wird und in die Maschinerie der Vernichtungslager gerät. Kindlich naiv erlebt er als immerfort Glücksuchender Deportation, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung, erlebt den Verlust an Naivität und die allmähliche Erkenntnis der Realität

Historia del año y medio de la vida de un adolescente en diversos campor de contración nazis (experiencia que el autor vivió en propia carne), Sin destino no es, sin mbargo, ningún texto autobiográfico. Con la fría objetividad del entomólogo y desde una distancia irónica, Kertész nos muestra en su historia la hiriente realidad de los campos de exterminio en sus efectos más eficazmente perversos: aquellos que confunden justicia y humillación arbitraria, y la cotidianidad más inhumana con una forma aberrante de felicidad. Testigo desapasionado, Sin destino es, por encima de todo, gran literatura, y una de las mejores novelas del siglo xx, capaz de dejar una huella profunda e imperecedera en el lector

“It was…unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was.” A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack — the British Flag — during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising’s brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on “the absurd order of chance,” he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening — an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertész remembered: “I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded — and which I had to take back from ‘History’, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone…” The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners