Selected poems and short stories

The collection of selected poems and short stories by Frigyes Karinthy was published in the publisher's student library series, the volume is aimed at high school students preparing for the graduation exam. But as far as its content is concerned, the book goes beyond the high school Karinthy material, and even deliberately puts the author's lesser-known and less frequently taught works in the foreground. Although the volume includes some classic works, which can probably be found in every literary text collection, such as The poems "Foreword" and "Message in a bottle" and the short story "Én és Énke" show the lesser-known side of Karinthy from the larger part of the book. The volume edited by András Beck also offers a taste of Karinthy's "serious" art. As can be seen from the afterword, the editor deliberately chose mainly from the free poems of the 1930s and the short stories of the 1910s. Most of the poems in the volume are quite long, free-flowing works, in which Karinthy often avoids any kind of centering. It doesn't matter whether the writer is writing about his dead sister (Litany of All Saints), his dying dog (Tomi) or about the use and loss of his own talent (Sámádás a talentóró), the poems are equally effective, powerful and poignant. And the same power characterizes the short stories in the volume. Reading them next to (or after) the poems, sometimes it almost doesn't seem that we are reading prose instead of poetry - many short stories (such as "The North Wind" or "The Compass") are as hypnotic, with a special atmosphere and lyrical as the poems already mentioned. All in all, despite the admittedly subjective selection (or precisely because of it), the volume is great for rediscovering Karinthy and learning a little more about her than the fact that she wrote the well-known plays Mr. Teacher, Please and That's How You Wrote.