I Don't Care

Somebody singing something.
I don''t care: it''s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.

Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy and selected by Ágota Kristof herself, I Don''t Care presents the Hungarian master at the height of her game. Harrowing yet delightfully whimsical, these short fictions oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. In Kristof''s world, cruelty abounds, but in a way that shifts the reader''s gaze to aspects of our shared reality, past and present, that one would not want to be without. The themes of exile and existential alienation are undeniable - as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading that surprises at every turn.<>

About the author

Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristóf and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristóf slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages. Kristóf's other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.

Product details

• Authors: gota, 193 Kristof, Agota Kristof, Ágota Kristóf
• Assisted by: Chris Andrews (Translation)
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.08.2025
• EAN: 9780241774052
• ISBN: 978-0-241-77405-2
• No. of pages: 96
• Dimensions: 116 mm x 182 mm x 10 mm
• Series: Penguin Modern Classics; Penguin International Writers
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Fiction > Narrative literature > Main work before 1945; FICTION / Short Stories (single author), FICTION / Classics, Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Short Stories, Fiction in translation, Hungary, FICTION / World Literature / Hungary, Classic fiction: general and literary