One Minute Stories

Fülszöveg

"While the soft-boiled egg is boiling or the number you are dialling answers (provided it is not engaged, of course), you have ample time to read one of these short stories which, because of their brevity, I have come to think of as one minute stories."
István Örkény

|"Supremely deft, witty and r »poignant, Örkény's stories sparkle. f^with the absurd and the inexplicable which he discovers gliding beneath the surface of the rituals, gossip, cafés and intrigues of contemporary Budapest. A newspaper misprint, an accident in the street, a funeral, „even the instructions pinned to the wall beside a fire extinguisher become the occasion for a méditation on existence. Örkény is a master of irony and the art of survival practisfd close to the stuff of orcWrary exprerience."
Cathy Peake
István Örkény (1912-1979) was born in Budapest. His father, Hugó Örkény (originally Österreicher), was a well know pharmacist. In accordance with his father's wishes, Örkény studied pharmatology, but... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"While the soft-boiled egg is boiling or the number you are dialling answers (provided it is not engaged, of course), you have ample time to read one of these short stories which, because of their brevity, I have come to think of as one minute stories."
István Örkény

|"Supremely deft, witty and r »poignant, Örkény's stories sparkle. f^with the absurd and the inexplicable which he discovers gliding beneath the surface of the rituals, gossip, cafés and intrigues of contemporary Budapest. A newspaper misprint, an accident in the street, a funeral, „even the instructions pinned to the wall beside a fire extinguisher become the occasion for a méditation on existence. Örkény is a master of irony and the art of survival practisfd close to the stuff of orcWrary exprerience."
Cathy Peake
István Örkény (1912-1979) was born in Budapest. His father, Hugó Örkény (originally Österreicher), was a well know pharmacist. In accordance with his father's wishes, Örkény studied pharmatology, but in 1937 began pub-lishing in Szép szó, a liberal journal headed by the poet Attila József. Author of a number of documentary novels, novellás, short stories and plays (The Family Tóth and Catsplay have been produced in the U.S. and the U.K.), Örkény is best kgow for his one minute stories. Ranging anywhere from a single sentence to a couple of pages, they are the metaphors for the upside-down world that Örkény saw around him in mid-20th century Hungary, a world where what would be grotesque elsewhere was the natural way of life, and the other way around. But in his one minute stories, Örkény stood the grotesque itself on its head, turning it in upon itself. "The grotesque nudges finality out of its comfortable self-complacency," he once said, "but it does not replace it with yet another finality. Instead of a period it opts for the question mark. It does not finalize, it opens the way to new possibil-ities."
Örkény's works available in English from Corvina include the two novellás The Flower Show and The Tóth Family, and the second anthology of his renowned one minute stories, More One Minute Stories.
Judith Sollosy, the translator of One Minute Stories, was bro jght up and educated in New York. She received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her M.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she alsó studied for her Ph.D. At present she is senior editor at Corvin&'Books; university lecturer in translation and creative writing, and con-tributing editor to The Chattahoochee Review. Her book-length translations include Endre Ady, Neighbours ofthe Night, Géza Csáth, The Magician's Garden, György Dalos, The Circumcision, and four novels by Péter Esterházy, The Book of Hrabal, A Little Hungárián Pornography; She Loves Me, and Celestial Harmonies. She is co-author of a textbook on translation, and the author of English into Hunglish, The Elements of Translation from Hungárián into English, alsó published by Corvina. Vissza