Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

Melville House is pub­lish­ing Imre Kertész’s Fias­co lat­er this month. Con­sid­ered to be the untrans­lat­ed miss­ing” book from the tril­o­gy that won Imre Kertész the Nobel Prize,”Fias­co con­tin­ues the sto­ry that Kertész began with Fate­less­ness and Kad­dish for an Unborn Child. More from the publisher:

Fias­co, as Imre Kertész him­self has said, is fic­tion found­ed on real­i­ty” – a Kaf­ka-like account that is sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny in its unre­lent­ing­ly pes­simistic clar­i­ty, of the Com­mu­nist takeover of his home­land. Forced into the army and assigned to escort mil­i­tary pris­on­ers, the pro­tag­o­nist decides to feign insan­i­ty to be released from duty. But mean­while, life under the new regime is por­trayed almost as an unin­ter­rupt­ed con­tin­u­a­tion of life in the Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps – which in turn, is depict­ed as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the patri­ar­chal dic­ta­tor­ship of a joy­less child­hood. It is, in short, a sear­ing exten­sion of Kertész’s fun­da­men­tal theme: the total­i­tar­i­an expe­ri­ence seen as trau­ma not only for an indi­vid­ual, but for the whole civ­i­liza­tion – ours – that made Auschwitz possible.

Read more here.

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor and now CEO, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.