The Flower Show and the Toth Family

The Flower Show and The Toth Family, two novellas in one volume by István Örkény (1912-79), introduce to an English-speaking audience a Hungarian writer with a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In the ’60s and ’70s, Örkény’s vein of black comedy earned him the epithet “master of the grotesque” for the popular dramatizations of these and other novels. The Flower Show (1977) is Örkény’s last novel and his most widely translated work of fiction. With consummate irony, the author ex...