Peter Nadas, Author of ‘the Greatest Novel Written in Our Time,’ Dies at 83
Susan Sontag gave that high praise to “A Book of Memories,” a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism.
Alex Marshal 27 Agust 2026
Peter Nadas, a Hungarian author who was best known for“A Book of Memories”(1986), a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism, and who was often discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday at his home in Gombosszeg, Hungary. He was 83.
The physical copy of Peter Nadas’s “Parallel Stories” does not hold up well to a particularly aggressive reading. In at least one reader’s experience, cracking the book’s spine to make the 1,133-page tome into a more manageable bedtime read caused pages to break loose from their binding; by novel’s end piles of disordered pages were scattered every which way.
Péter Nádas is Hungary’s leading contemporary writer. A scholar not only of literature, but of culture, horticulture, and above all the human body and its communications, Nádas presents a picture of temperament and elegance in the great tradition of the European intellectual. He has often been compared, perhaps syntactically, to the high realists Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. Susan Sontag, one of Nádas’s earliest and most vocal champions, compares his plays to the “encounter-dramas of Pina Bausch” and the “declamatory plays of Thomas Bernhard.” I myself see him, in many ways, as the Thomas Mann of our times.
From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star
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More than seven decades after they were first released, the dark novels of Osamu Dazai have become a publishing sensation, as a new generation of readers engage with his bleakness, humour and brilliance
There’s something eerie about reading Osamu Dazai today. Not because of his death, though drowning in a canal with your lover does linger. Not because of his depression, though it claws through every line. But because Dazai, dead since 1948, feels like he’s writing from inside your head. Even now.
From cover design to shelf placement and influencer partnerships … how publishers will persuade you to buy their books this autumn
How to make a bestseller: insiders reveal the tricks of the book trade
John Self Saturday 29 Augusto 2027
Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, aTikTokvideo? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?
A sense of the ridiculous and the serious … Pirkko Saisio.
Translated fiction roundup
Review
The best recent translated fiction – review roundup
The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio; Short Circuit by Wolf Haas; Cosmos by Lucia Odoom; The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya
John Self
Friday 21 Augusto 2026
The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg, Penguin International Writers (£14.99) Following Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight, this book completes Finnish author Saisio’s autofictional trilogy. It covers her young adulthood in the 1970s, where she comes out as lesbian (“The electricity doesn’t go out. The Richter scale remains still”) and falls in love. One of her lovers, Havva, is a communist who’s engaged to a man; she relies on his rich parents for funding, but pees in their private pool as a protest. Later, Saisio is voted vice-president of a political drama company, as “she has the skills to bring about the revolution, specifically via theatre” – despite half-baked productions such as the “napalm opera” Vietnam-a-Go-Go. As that suggests, this is a story with a sense of both the ridiculous and the serious. Told in clear prose, it playfully shifts between third and first person as Saisio recounts her memories then analyses them. This enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic.
The “grand old troublemaker of Finnish fiction”,Pirkko Saisio, answers HLA’s questions.
Your most recent book Prevarications is a mix of many various genres: fiction and metafiction, essay, memoirs, theatre, polemic… It is quite personal, too – the word “confessions” is right there in the title for a reason. Doesn’t it feel rather dangerous to play with the boundaries of autofiction, to write so intimately?
An enduring influence … Yayoi Kusama as a young woman.
‘I fight pain and fear with art’: how Yayoi Kusama blazed a trail for neurodivergent artists
The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu
Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said, when asked about that recurring motif. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”
Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic art was at its best when taken in high doses
With dots that dizzied the viewer, the giddy sensory overload of seeing the grandest installations of her octopuses and giant pumpkins was hard to resist
Ionce had an argument about Yayoi Kusama with Peter Gabriel. Not in person – I’ve never met the prog rock hero. But after I recorded some critical comments on her work for the BBC, I watched the segment only to see Gabriel passionately defending her. My onscreen cynicism seemed harsh indeed compared with his soulful appreciation of all those dots.
My scepticism about Kusama started the first time I saw her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The context is significant because after a big dose of Jackson Pollock’s looping, tangled forests of colour and line (colour as line), Piet Mondrian’s pulsing Broadway Boogie Woogie and other great abstract art, Kusama’s dots appeared to me static, planned, predictable. I wasn’t excited or moved.
