Danilo Kiš

Danilo Kiš

Danilo Kiš was born in 1935 in Subotica, on Yugoslavia’s border with Hungary. His works available in translation in the U.S. include three novels, Garden, Ashes, The Hourglass, and the Encyclopedia of the Dead. Starting in the mid-1970s, he lived mostly in France. He was awarded the Golden Eagle of the City of Nice and, just before his death in Paris in 1989, American PEN’s Bruno Schulz Prize.

Early Sorrows

by Danilo Kiš

Originally published in Belgrade in 1969 and never before translated into English, Early Sorrows is a stunning group of linked stories that memorialize Danilo Kis’s childhood. Kis, a writer of incomparable originality and eloquence, famous for his books The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Hourglass, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, was born in 1935 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, near the Hungarian border. “Back and forth over this land, during Danilo Kis’s childhood, armies and ideologies washed with the brutal regularity of surf,” William Gass noted in The New York Review of Books.…
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In Kiš’s case . . . it is the consistent quality of the local prose that counts. It is how, sentence by sentence, the song is built, and immeasurable meanings meant. It is the rich regalia of his rhetoric that leads us to acknowledge his authority. On his page, trappings are not trappings, but sovereignty itself.
—New York Review of Books
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