With a long and distinguished career, Miklós Mészöly is acknowledged as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Known primarily as a short-story writer and novelist, Mészöly is also an accomplished essayist, dramatist, and poet. Among the few Hungarian writers during the postwar era to resist the aesthetics of socialist realism imposed by the political regime, Mészöly was instrumental in maintaining a standard of artistic integrity in Hungarian literature. His art effectively links Hungarian short fiction as modernized in the first decades of the twentieth century, mainly through the work of Dezso Kosztolányi, with the postmodernist short fiction that became prevalent in the last decades of the twentieth century. Mészöly was not only a forerunner of but also an active participant in the literary trends...