One of the best novels by Laszlo Krasznahorkai is now available in a stunningly redesigned paperback edition.

The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's majestic, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to showcase the preserved body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the middle of winter and sparks bizarre rumors. It spreads the rumor that the circus performers have a sinister agenda, and the frightened citizens cling to any form of order they can find—music, cosmology, fascism. The characters in the novel are unforgettable: the malevolent Mrs. Eszter, who plots to take over the town; her weak husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who forms the delicate center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful, and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as the immensely talented translator George Szirtes puts it, is "a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of writing." Yet the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader in moon-like leaps and bounds."

Laszlo Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, Hungary. He has written five novels and won numerous awards, including the International Man Booker Prize in 2015, the Best Translated Book Award in Fiction in 2013 for Satantango, and the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany in 1993 for The Melancholy of Resistance.