Antal Szerb Libros

En 1933, el húngaro János Bátky estudia ocultismo en Londres y conoce al conde Owen Pendragon, quien lo invita a su castillo. Allí, enfrentan amenazas fantasmagóricas y una conspiración. Un robo de manuscrito desencadena un ritual mágico y una resolución sorprendente, combinando elementos góticos y de misterio al estilo de Hitchcock y Wilde.

This collection showcases the essays of Antal Szerb, a prominent Hungarian writer and critic, renowned for his influential role in inter-war literary life. Despite his significant contributions, Szerb's career was tragically cut short by the rise of Fascism, leading to his deportation and death in a concentration camp. This volume marks the first time his important essays have been translated into English, highlighting his enduring legacy and the impact of his work on literature, both in Hungary and internationally.

A major classic of 1930s literature, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...'Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with wife Erszi, he soon abandons her in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life, or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (first published as Utas és Holdvilág in Hungary in 1937) is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.

A comic fable from one of the masters of twentieth-century prose

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 fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later. In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age—including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is, at heart, a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.

A collection of Szerb's shorter fiction, which superbly demonstrates his development from young idealist to mature ironist.

In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale. This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.

A collection of Szerb's shorter fiction, which superbly demonstrates his development from young idealist to mature ironist

Europäische Literatur von Weltformat! «Alles fing an … oder vielmehr, es fing eigentlich überhaupt nie an, denn ich las und schrieb schon immer, fast vom Augenblick meiner Geburt an (ich war die bebrillte Art von Kleinkind) …» Kein Wunder, dass der ungarische Literaturhistoriker und Romancier Antal Szerb (1901–1945) sich in der Bibliothek aufhielt, wo er die meisten seiner Texte verfasste. Für Szerb war Literatur weit mehr als ein Studienobjekt; sie war ein unverzichtbares Lebenselement. Mit einer persönlichen Sichtweise und viel ästhetischem sowie psychologischem Einfühlungsvermögen versuchte er, Literatur zu fassen, geprägt von Sensibilität für Nuancen und tiefer Humanität. Szerbs Credo besagt, dass Literatur die Ewigkeit repräsentieren und überhistorische Relevanz besitzen sollte. Sein Begriff der Weltliteratur umfasst nur das, was er für das Beste hielt, also Autoren und Werke, die über die Jahrhunderte und Grenzen hinweg Bestand hatten. Neben Romanen und Erzählungen wuchs ein reicher Schatz an literarisch-historischen Porträts. Der Komparatist András Horn, emeritierter Professor für Literaturtheorie an der Universität Basel, hat für diese Ausgabe sieben solcher Porträts ausgewählt und erstmals ins Deutsche übertragen, die für die europäischen Literaturen von besonderer Bedeutung sind. Szerb widmet sich darin Autoren wie Stefan George, Baldassare Castiglione, Henrik Ibsen, William Blake, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Miguel de Ce