Memory Burn, is a coming-of-age story of a queer boy from a Czech industrial town. Torcík’ delves into the recesses of memory in an effort to come to terms with painful memories from his childhood. As a homosexual boy with a slight build growing up in a small industrial town, the protagonist of the story faces severe bullying at school, but his problems aren’t over once he gets home: his...

A term of physiology and neurology, algometry is the science of measuring pain. However, it is not physical pain that Iryna Vikyrchak examines in Algometry, but her experiences growing up in Western Ukraine in the ’90s, emphasizing emotional sensitivity and inner strength, which give way to a philosophical and lyrical reflection on pain, suffering, and empathy as a measurement of our humanness....

War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's...

Now in paperback, Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel 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. ‘Their world,’ in the...