László Krasznahorkai

"Set in an isolated hamlet, Satantango unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance."--P. [i].

"Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly...

"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, fueled by the idees 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 resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs...

"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: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: "he continu- ally saw the garden in his mind's eye without being able to touch its existence." This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner...

The mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. In an unknown time in an unnamed village, one day, a mysterious circus complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence.