{"title":"Books by Krisztina Toth","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780857426093","title":"Pixel","description":"A collection of stories from a Hungarian writer that treats relationships and love in contemporary life.    Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth’s book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual’s life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57697065992565,"sku":"9781803095943","price":17.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56295051592053,"sku":"9780857426093","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781803095943_67f1f6ef-3e49-48c4-a718-5394f0414298.jpg?v=1793083674"},{"product_id":"9781780377032","title":"My Secret Life","description":"Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English.   My Secret Life is the first book of Krisztina Tóth’s poetry in English translation. The poems were selected by her from three of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.   ‘Her work has the nervous energy of the times but is shaped by a deep and disciplined intelligence. Her subjects are invariably human. They are concerned with love, family, friendship, loss, and a kind of existential disaffection. Tragic in one sense but ever inventive, full of life’s minute yet highly resonant particulars, they seem to extend into an almost cinematic narrative about the cruelties of factory farming, murder, ageing, the treatment of women as sex toys and death itself. She is a bravura formalist when she needs to be. Her vigour and scope are enormous.’ – George Szirtes'Poems pulsating with sensual power, deeply painful poems, about everything that is regarded as very personal.[…] Not with her themes, not with her tone does she prove to be an innovator. In this respect she remains faithful to the great, intellectual current of Hungarian poetry, a current that is not very old. It can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century […] Krisztina Tóth proves herself to be an innovator within this important tradition through the stirring rhythm of her poems. She wraps her persona, ready for any change of form, in rhythm. In other words, she makes herself impersonal in the most personal of ways and ready for confessions that are relevant for everyone; through her changing tone, through her surprises. […] Krisztina Tóth's composition sets her apart from all the others. She has the strength of a buffalo and the weightlessness of a butterfly.' – Péter Nádas, afterword to Barcode?Reviewing Krisztina Tóth’s short story collection Pixel under the title ‘The Hungarian Author who foresaw the future of Nationalism’, Stephanie Newman wrote: ‘Tóth muses that generations of humans, like bobbing needles, are “seaming together the fraying layers of the past and the present”. Their countries of origin don’t matter; neither do their religions, genders, or ethnicities. What Tóth creates in Pixel is emblematic of Europe as she sees it: a place in which “everything is sewn together while the thread itself is invisible”.’","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303288287605,"sku":"9781780377032","price":12.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781780377032_df81c041-c674-46d4-960a-63480ae3342f.jpg?v=1786025372"},{"product_id":"9781911710240","title":"Eye of the Monkey","description":"Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoised. On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being stalked for weeks by a young man, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihaly Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own. In Toth's deftly woven, dystopian, and polyphonic novel - full of twists, turns, and treachery - we plumb the depths of a fractured, disturbed, and isolated society, as well as the underbelly of social perversions such a society produces.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313146016117,"sku":"9781911710240","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911710240_845b2414-d501-4e9d-a2cd-e6d3122bca54.jpg?v=1786030357"},{"product_id":"white-wolf-1","title":"White Wolf","description":"A powerful collection of sixteen unsettling stories that delve into the hidden traumas of everyday life.      “Every home is a different story,” says one narrator in White Wolf while looking for her own childhood home. Every unhappy home is unhappy in its own way—and so are the stories in Krisztina Tóth’s new volume, in which the writer’s voice is darker and more radical than ever.    These are stories of trauma, oppression, submission, exclusion, stigma, and violence. Many of them tell of childhood abuses, unpunished crimes, lost children—suffering that goes without punishment, apology, and forgiveness. Her mostly nameless heroes are everywhere around us, stepping into the same elevator, running behind us on the staircase. Many of them are so wounded or tormented that they behave in strange ways. In White Wolf, Tóth observes these characters with acute sensitivity and attentiveness to detail.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57487922528629,"sku":"9781803096162","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781803096162.jpg?v=1791212810"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-krisztina-toth.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}