Danilo Kiš Libri

This collection of short stories depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes and the multitude of details that make up human life.

Written between 1980 and 1986, the stories in The Lute and the Scars were transcribed from the manuscripts left by Danilo Kis following his death in 1989. Many are autobiographical. Others resurrect protagonists belonging to Kis's fellow Central European novelists.

'The Hourglass' tells the story of the final months of one man's life in the period leading up to his dispatch to a concentration camp. It is considered to be Danilo Kis's masterpiece.

Composed of seven dark tales, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich presents variations on the theme of political and social self-destruction throughout Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters in these stories are caught in a world of political hypocrisy, which ultimately leads to death, their common fate. Although the stories Kis tells are based on historical events, the beauty and precision of his prose elevates these ostensibly true stories into works of literary art that transcend the politics of their time.

Danilo Kis is one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe. This collection of short fiction delves into uncanny characters, magical places and millennia of history. From the story of a counter-prophet, Simon Magus, who performs a blasphemous miracle in ancient Samaria, to 'Red Stamps with Lenin's Head', revealing the heartbroken secret of a poet's work, to 'The Encyclopedia of the Dead' an almighty catalogue of the life of every ordinary person to have died since 1789, these are tales brimming with imagination, horror, comedy and the sublime.

'Sleepers awake in a remote cave and the ancient mystic Simon Magus attempts a miracle, in these two magical, otherworldly tales from one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe.