I Don't Care

Never before translated short stories by the legendary Ágota Kristóf

'One of the 20th century's greatest writers' Camilla Grudova
'Pure genius' Max Porter

I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.

I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

Translated from French by Chris Andrews

Ágota Kristóf (Author)
Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristóf and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristóf slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages. Kristóf’s other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.

Chris Andrews (Translator)
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He has translated Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and Kaouther Adimi, and received the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. Andrews has published two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.