Desired Desire 
Adam Phillips
- Conversations in Bolzano by Sándor Márai, translated by George Szirtes Buy this book
The first English translation of a novel by Sándor Márai, Embers, came out in 2001. It had been published in Hungary in 1942, but next to nothing was known in the West about its author: the publisher’s blurb said that he had been born in Kassa in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900 and was one of the leading ‘literary’ novelists of the 1930s in Hungary; and that, ‘profoundly anti-Fascist, he survived the Second World War, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948.’ He went first to Italy and then the United States, committing suicide in San Diego in 1989. The book itself was described as a masterpiece by several reviewers.
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Adam Phillips’s Intimacies, written with Leo Bersani, is out now. A book on the pleasures of kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is due in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
Bored with Sex? · Nasty Turns
Remember me · Bret Easton Ellis
No reason for not asking · Empson’s War on God
What You Really Want · Edmund White
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