World Goes On

FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025 Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As Laszlo Krasznahorkai himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...' The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.' Translated by Ottilie Muzlet, George Szirtes and John Batki

Review: One of the great inventors of new forms in contemporary literature ... there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature -- Adam Thirwell * New York Review of Books *
This collection - a masterpiece of invention, utterly different from everything else - is hugely unsettling and affecting; to meet Krasznahorkai's characters, to read his breathless, twisting sentences, is to feel altered. * Guardian *
Stories of journeys that, whether undertaken or thwarted, arrive at transcendence. At the end there is only one way to go, in what has to be the most powerful page written so far this century. -- Paul Griffiths * TLS Books of the Year *