iris literary agency

A many-layered tale in which the main character is the place. The enclosed, stifling city. Strange and lonely people. A young man travels through glossy magazine photographs while at the same time his beloved sets fire to the bed she had through adolescence. A black-clad woman, entranced like an ancient priestess, frightens passers-by with her wild dancing.

Shunyata is a philosophical thriller. It is not a conventional novel. Rather than chapters, it contains a biography, a chronicle, a description of a photo album, a long philosophical letter and a novella. Its details the protagonist's anguish as he struggles to construct a personal philosophy based on his uncertainties, fears, aspirations, and contradictions. It is an exercise in Theopoesis [Greek for: Creating a God]. The story revolves around a treatise on fallacy, and it involves a number of suicides and the destructive duplicity that is often perpetrated by modern-day cults. The story is set in the mid-western United States in the late 1960s.

French extracts available / Ungarian translation available 

French rights sold.

Kastaniotis, 1999, 157 p.

On the day that poet Laura Jackson died, in 1991, the LondonTimes published the following obituary: “Laura Jackson was a tragic figure and one of this century’s most gifted women. There is no question that literary criticism and history will have to wrestle with her singular achievement.” Laura Jackson’s biography was a series of ruptures which brutally cut up her life like a succession of knife stabs. She left New York to live in Europe; she entered an illicit, long-term affair with poet Robert Graves; their relationship ended abruptly with a double suicide attempt, one day in London, in 1929.

Encounters from a journey to India

"...Then, a few seconds before the first drop, we suddenly smelled the oncoming rain. The dancing stopped. Mangla leaned out the window laughing. Sweat gleamed on her back. The monsoon broke out heavy but silent, without clap or lightning. As if arriving, with British punctuality, at a predetermined rendezvous. It hit the train hard, as if trying to slow it down, and drops sprayed all over the compartment, whirling in the air and outright soaking our already wet clothes. We spent the rest of that journey exhausted, mesmerized by the dampness and the humming of the rainfall. Sleep on that train felt deep and hot. Like sleeping beside another body."