Ghost Geographies

A wry, propulsive, visceral collection of stories about the afterlives of utopia -- imagined and real -- from the author of the Writers' Trust Prize-winning Siege 13. Fleeing communist Budapest by air balloon, a wrestler tries to reinvent himself in Canada. On a formal invitation from the Party's General Secretary, a Belgian bureaucrat "defects" to communist Hungary, chasing the dream of a better world. Meanwhile, a provocateur filmmaker drinks and blasts his way to a final, celluloid confrontation with fascism, while an enfant terrible philosopher works on his prophetic, posthumously panned masterpiece, Dyschrony. These are among the decadent and absurd characters who hover around the promise and failure of utopia across the pages of Ghost Geographies. Crossing the porous borders of fact and fiction, the reinforced ones of the communist East and the capitalist-democratic West, and the literary ones between Bolaño, Sebald, and Kundera, these new stories confirm that, in the words of the Washington Post, Tamas Dobozy's "approaches to telling stories, and his commitment not only to provoke thought but to entertain, constitute a virtuoso performance."