The hallucinatory, unforgettable account of a moment - or an eternity - in an uncertain love affair

The man has actually come to tell his lover that he wants to leave her, but as soon as he walks in he realizes he won't be able to tell her. The woman rolls a joint. They smoke it. And as they drift into another state of mind, he approaches the border zones between being and nonbeing, between living and imagining, or is it between life and death?

From the acclaimed author of A Book of Memories we now have this unsettling and strangely beautiful exploration of the...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, Peter Nadas. Now, in Fire and Knowledge, a superb collection of short stories, essays, and literary criticism, we discover other aspects of Nadas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, and as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree....

First published in Hungary in 1986 after a five-year battle with censors, Peter Nadas's A Book of Memories is a modern classic, a multi-layered narrative that tells three parallel stories of love and betrayal. The first takes place in East Berlin in the 1970s and features an unnamed Hungarian writer ensnared in a love triangle with a young German and a famous aging actress. The second, composed by the writer, is the story of a late nineteenth century German aesthete whose experiences mirror his own. And the third voice is that of a friend from the writer's childhood, who brings his...