Extraordinary stories

Unusual Stories captures long-forgotten times and the fleeting atmosphere of cities in Europe, Hungary, and Budapest, while our human nature remains unchanged. Towards the end of his life, Dezső Kosztolányi wrote mostly short stories. The last complete collected edition contains 242 of them. Kosztolányi included 35 short stories in the 1933 book edition. These were also published in a Slovak translation by Karol Wlachovský under the title Večerné romance. The compilation of a new Slovak selection titled Nevšedné príbehy (Unusual Stories) was prompted by the scholarly monograph Kosztolányi Dezső by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. Dezső Kosztolányi (1885, Szabadka/Subotica – 1936, Budapest) was a poet, prose writer, essayist, columnist, translator, and a dominant figure in modern Hungarian literature of the first third of the 20th century. The Slovak root of his family name reveals that his ancestors from Subotica had moved from Upper Hungary (Kostoľany) to Lower Hungary (Vojvodina) in the former Kingdom of Hungary. He received his basic education at home and at the grammar school in Subotica. He enrolled at the Faculties of Philosophy at the universities of Budapest and Vienna. However, he was drawn to newspapers and writing. He did not complete his studies, but he gained exceptional orientation and an overview of artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical trends, which he applied in his extensive and genre-diverse literary work. At the height of his creative powers in 1933, he discovered symptoms of malignant cancer in himself, to which he eventually succumbed in September 1936.