I Don't Care

At a short story level, Kristóf – one of the 20th century’s great writers – reminds us what startling potential and transcendental power the form holds. The stories in I Don’t Care are fairytales from a strange and illuminating landscape

Camilla Grudova

These stories are timeless stark fables – catnip for a readership that has developed a taste for existential angst

John Self, The Guardian

The stories in I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf might examine a small moment minutely or tell a person’s whole life in a handful of words… Fantastic

Times Literary Supplement

Her descriptions – of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide – offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad

Eimear McBride

Stark and haunting

San Francisco Chronicle

Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up

Publishers Weekly

Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power – part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive

Kirkus Reviews

For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction

Missouri Williams, The Nation

Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form

Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker