Description

Never before translated short stories by the legendary Agota Kristof

‘One of the 20th century’s greatest writers’ Camilla Grudova
‘Pure genius’ Max Porter

I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.

I Don’t Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Agota Kristof, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristof’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

Translated from French by Chris Andrews

Publisher Review

At a short story level, Kristof - one of the 20th century's great writers - reminds us what startling potential and transcendental power the form holds. The stories in I Don't Care are fairytales from a strange and illuminating landscape -- Camilla Grudova Pure genius -- Max Porter Her descriptions - of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide - offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad -- Eimear McBride * Times Literary Supplement * Stark and haunting * San Francisco Chronicle * Mischievous and mournful... moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up * Publishers Weekly * Many of Kristof's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power - part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive * Kirkus Reviews * For Kristof, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristof's writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction -- Missouri Williams * The Nation * Kristof's sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristof's fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form -- Jennifer Krasinski * The New Yorker *