Opium and Other Stories

A rediscovered classic of Hungarian literature, this spellbinding collection vividly depicts the darkest impulses of the human psyche against the backdrop of Europe’s moral and social decline on the eve of World War I

Géza Csáth (pen name of Joszef Brenner) was a writer, playwright, musician, psychiatrist, and physician born in Hungary at the end of the 19th century. One of Sigmund Freud’s earliest followers, he pushed both life and art to radical extremes in an all-consuming—and ultimately fatal—search for the unvarnished truth about the human condition.

Written with unsparing clarity and reminiscent of the works of Frank Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe for their dark pessimism and gothic imagination, the short stories collected here pierce the veil of the seemingly tranquil, ordinary lives of their protagonist. At times realistic, at times dreamlike, Csáth’s gruesome, harrowing tales reveal the violent and irrational forces lurking just beneath the surface of a society on the verge of the abyss.

“A memorable volume, Csáth’s depiction of the collapse of Central Europe, by way of magnification of the collapse of the individual, is uncannily prophetic.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic

TARGET READERSHIP

- For readers interested in psychology, European history, gothic fiction, fiction that explores addiction and the darkest recesses of the human mind
- For readers of Franz Kafka, Edgard Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Joseph Roth, Magda Szabo, Tove Ditlevsen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Carmen Maria Machado
- Readers interested in the crisis of European civilization in the years leading to World War I

KEY SELLING POINTS

-A new edition of the author’s only work of fiction to have been translated into English (previous editions are out of print)
- Opportunity to reintroduce one of Hungary’s most celebrated and visionary authors to readers in North America
- An absorbing, eerily prescient representation of European society in the early 20th century and its profound crisis
- A timely criticism of bourgeois conformism and materialism
- Author struggled with addiction, mental illness, killed himself after murdering his wife