Stories and Novellas
Sorozat: Written in Hungary

Ivan Mandy (1918-1995) created one of the most original oeuvres in 20th-century Hungarian fiction. The stories written in the first half of his career have become classics of the genre, recalling Chekhov and Salinger. From the 1970s on Mandy's writings, borrowing techniques from the radio play and the cinema, have projected scenes from the narrator's mindscapes, catching memory and desire in he act, capturing states of mind in the process of becoming, strange and familial voices arising from the near and distant past, erasing the tenuous boundaries between dreaming past and waking, past and present. The dozen stories and novellas in What Was Left have been selected from four collections of Ivan Mandy's fiction published between 1972 and 1992. In them, starting from the material things of everyday life, transcending the realm of the rational and, like his beloved Buster Keaton, approaching other dimensions in the hierarchy of being, Ivan Mandy works his quiet, enigmatic and preposterous charm. --- from book's back cover.