Opium and Other Stories

A rediscovered classic of Hungarian literature, this spellbinding collection vividly depicts the darkest impulses of the human psyche against the backdrop of Europe’s moral and social decline on the eve of World War I.

Géza Csáth (pen name of Joszef Brenner) was a writer, playwright, musician, psychiatrist, and physician born in Hungary at the end of the 19th century. One of Sigmund Freud’s earliest followers, he pushed both life and art to radical extremes in an all-consuming—and ultimately fatal—search for the unvarnished truth about the human condition.

At times realistic, at times dreamlike, Csáth’s gruesome, harrowing tales reveal the violent and irrational forces lurking just beneath the surface of a society on the verge of the abyss.