Love in a Bottle

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IN 1947, two years after his death, a collection was made of Antal Szerb’s short stories and novellas. Overseen by his widow, it brought together everything he had published in this genre, together with fragments of a projected novel and three new stories found in desk drawers. Under its 1963 title Szerelem a palackban, it has enjoyed regular reprinting in Hungary. Though not exhaustive, it covers almost the full sweep of Szerb’s distressingly brief career: he was still a student in 1922 when “Ajándok’s Betrothal” was accepted by the influential literary journal Nyugat; “The Duke” (1943) was effectively the last thing he wrote.

In 2010 Pushkin Press published a selection of these tales in English translation, under the present title Love in a Bottle. This new edition adds two further short stories, “Cynthia” and “A Garden Party in St Cloud”. They had been omitted on the grounds that the author had probably never intended them for publication. In retrospect, that was too rigid a criterion for excluding two narratives of real brilliance that are central to his artistic development. To make that development easier to follow, in another departure from the 2010 volume, the material is here printed in strictly chronological order of writing.

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