Dossier K.

This book came about through a conversation the author had with his friend Zoltan Hafner over the course of 2003 and 2004. The result is an extraordinary self-portrait, in which Kertesz interrogates himself about the course of his own remarkable life, moving from memories of his childhood in Budapest, his imprisonment in Nazi death camps and the forged record that saved his life, his experiences as a censored journalist in postwar Hungary under successive totalitarian communist regimes, and his eventual turn to fiction. Kertesz continues to delve into the questions that have long occupied him: the legacy of the Holocaust, the distinctions drawn between fiction and reality, and what he calls "that wonderful burden of being responsible for oneself.