Opium and Other Stories

A rediscovered classic of Hungarian literature, this spellbinding collection vividly depicts the darkest impulses of the human psyche against the backdrop of Europe’s moral and social decline on the eve of World War I

Géza Csáth (pen name of Joszef Brenner) was a writer, playwright, musician, psychiatrist, and physician born in Hungary at the end of the 19th century. One of Sigmund Freud’s earliest followers, he pushed both life and art to radical extremes in an all-consuming—and ultimately fatal—search for the unvarnished truth about the human condition.

Written with unsparing clarity and reminiscent of the works of Frank Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe for their dark pessimism and gothic imagination, the short stories collected here pierce the veil of the seemingly tranquil, ordinary lives of their protagonist. At times realistic, at times dreamlike, Csáth’s gruesome, harrowing tales reveal the violent and irrational forces lurking just beneath the surface of a society on the verge of the abyss.

“A memorable volume, Csáth’s depiction of the collapse of Central Europe, by way of magnification of the collapse of the individual, is uncannily prophetic.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic

Gésa Csáth was a Hungarian writer, critic, musician, and medical doctor. One of Sigmund Freud’s first followers, he became interested in the effects of narcotics and developed an addiction to opium. After fighting in WWI, in 1919 he killed his wife and committed suicide. He was 31 years old.

Jascha Kessler is a poet, writer, and translator. His translation of Traveling Light by Kirsti Simonsuuri won the Finnish Literary Translation Centre Award in 2001. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, where he was also Fulbright Professor of American Literature. He is currently Professor Emeritus of English and Modern Literature at UCLA.

Charlotte Rogers came to the United States in 1939 from Romania and studied at the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois, and at UCLA. She later worked as a freelance translator. Besides English, she spoke Hungarian, Romanian, French, and German.