To an innocent bystander, The World Goes On might seem a bland title for a story collection, suggestive of heartwarming tales about good, simple people enduring life’s hardships with grit and courage. Seasoned Krasznahorkaians, however, will understand that the title should be read in a tone of mocking, even deranged, sarcasm, followed by a mirthless snort and a forceful expectoration. In László Krasznahorkai’s fiction the world never goes on. It is always ending. Or, as Krasznahorkai might write, the world is always ending, bursting into flames, collapsing into itself, exploding, tearing apart, disintegrating, being devoured by nothingness.

This sensibility is announced in the opening lines of the first story, which bears one of Krasznahorkai’s proudly obscurantist titles, “Wandering-Standing”:

I have to leave this place, because this is not where anyone can be, or where it would be worthwhile to remain, because this is the place—with its intolerable, cold, sad, bleak and deadly weight—from where I must escape …

This note echoes through the remaining 20 stories, in various shades of darkness, ranging from starless night to oblivion. A scrapbook of representative phrases, each taken from a different story: “foundering in a slough of despond”; “the incidental termination of an excruciating spiritual journey”; “the endgame of the spirit”; “how could I say anything new when there is nothing new under the sun?”; “exploring the dance steps of saying goodbye to the world”; “nothing whatsoever exists at all”; “the hope that he would die some day.”

László Krasznahorkai—born in 1954 in