Lajos Grendel Lajos (1948-2018), born seventy-five years ago, was the winner of the Kossuth Prize for Hungarian literature in (Czechoslovakia) and the dominant creator of Hungarian prose from the last two decades of the last century until his death. He began his career as a novelist in the 1970s. And although his first published book, Hűtlenek (1979), was also a collection of short stories, he achieved great success with his first novels (Éleslánozzet, 1981; Galeri, 1982; Áttételek, 1985), with which he caught up with the leading edge of the Hungarian prose of his time. However, in his next collection of stories (The contents of Bőröndök, 1987), he found his characteristic voice even as a novelist, which was followed by another volume of novels and journalism: The Jokes of Onirism in 1993. Then, for more than two decades until the mid-2010s, the novelist, the publicist and the literary historian again took over the field from the short story writer, whose new short prose book entitled Bad times are coming out only in 2016.
Our present volume covers the short stories and narratives of Lajos Grendel - thus, in addition to the material of his short story books published during his lifetime, as an Appendix, his short prose opuses that were omitted from them and only published in magazines: from the 1970 A tennis ball to the 2018 story Szűz Mária guides Pírit.
László Tóth edited the volume, took care of the texts and wrote the afterword.