In 1945, near the end of World War II, Antal Szerb, the author of "The Traveler," was executed along with 2000 other Hungarian Jews during a forced march westward. Three years later the New York Jewish Refugee Aid Society erected a memorial in the Hu...
Hungarian Antal Szerb is best known in the West as the author of three extraordinary novels, most notably Journey by Moonlight (1937), and a highly entertaining study of the Ancient Regime in France, The Queen's Necklace (1942). This selection of his...
An NYRB Classics OriginalThe trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s honeymoon tour of Italy. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble picks up in Rave...
In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything -- an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of...
The restless King Oliver VII of Alturia, an obscure Central European state whose only notable exports are wine and sardines, wants nothing more than an easy life: so, plotting a coup against himself, King Oliver VII escapes to Venice in search of ‘...
While visiting a Welsh castle, a young scholar finds himself at the center of occult rituals and a murder mystery in this “absolute treat” of a gothic detective story (The Guardian) At an end-of-the London season soiree, the young Hungarian schol...
Special 70th Anniversary American Edition A new translation by writer and poet Peter Hargitai
"Writer and poet Peter Hargitai, working on an English translation of Utas és holdvilág [Traveler and the Moonlight] in 1988, met with Szer...