White Wolf: Sixteen Stories

A powerful collection of sixteen unsettling stories that delve into the hidden traumas of everyday life.

＂Every home is a different story,＂ says one narrator in White Wolf while looking for her own childhood home. Every unhappy home is unhappy in its own way--and so are the stories in Krisztina Tóth’s new volume, in which the writer’s voice is darker and more radical than ever.

These are stories of trauma, oppression, submission, exclusion, stigma, and violence. Many of them tell of childhood abuses, unpunished crimes, lost children--suffering that goes without punishment, apology, and forgiveness. Her mostly nameless heroes are everywhere around us, stepping into the same elevator, running behind us on the staircase. Many of them are so wounded or tormented that they behave in strange ways. In White Wolf, Tóth observes these characters with acute sensitivity and attentiveness to detail.

Krisztina Tóth is one of Hungary’s most highly acclaimed poets and writers. She lives in Budapest where, apart from writing, she leads seminars on creative writing. Owen Good, born in Northern Ireland, is a translator of Hungarian poetry and prose. His translations of Krisztina Tóth’s work received Asymptote’s Close Approximations Prize and was nominated for the TA First Translation Prize, the EBRD Literary Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.