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More Advance Praise:
“Ilka Papp-Zakor’s strange, daring, evocative short stories weave mysteriously between baroque fantasy and the everyday brutality of contemporary life. In this keen, lyrical translation by Tímea Sipos, Angel Dinner beguiles and frightens, often in the space of a single paragraph.”
— Ken Kalfus, Author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, National Book Award finalist
“In these dark, fabulistic tales, narrators shapeshift, sell their toes . . . and yes, eat angels for dinner. Yet a remarkable tenderness is woven throughout the collection . . . . Strange, sometimes terrible things happen in these stories; they will worry you, break your heart. Let them.”
— Elizabeth Lucáks Chesla, Author of You Cannot Forbid the Flower
“Through Tímea Sipos's vivid translation, Ilka Papp-Zakor's landscapes shift fluidly between the real and the surreal, between familiar voices and unreliable narrators. This varied and expansive collection is held together by an unbroken, impassive voice that captures both magic and delusion—a sleight-of-hand in which the seemingly mundane betrays any solid ground.”
— Christianne Goodwin, Author of Oracle Smoke Machine
“Angel Dinner, by Ilka Papp-Zakor (tr. Tímea Sipos) is a series of haunting, fairy-tale-like narratives with a sinister edge in the best tradition of the central European grotesque. These stories, beautifully and lucidly rendered by Tímea Sipos, abound with vivid imagery and marginalized yet determined characters in utterly unique situations—from people who hunt angels, traveling healers showing up on the main square, a woman struggling to make herself understood in a strange flea market, a girl in a wheelchair living at the edge of a forest with her elderly grandfather, and a beggar whose upturned hat is regularly filled with caviar—among other unforgettable scenarios. This is a stunning debut.”
— Ottilie Mulzet, Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
“Ilka Papp-Zakor is a strikingly original writer. Readers may think of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, but such comparisons aren’t sufficient for fictions that define an innovative genre of surrealist tales that resonate like folklore. Through marvelously voiced translations by Tímea Sipos, these simple dark parables evoke metaphors for complex psychologies: villagers keep faith in magic healers no matter how many times they fail; a girl in a wheelchair forgotten by her dementia-suffering grandfather in a dark forest endures on hope; a homeless beggar takes caviar left by a mysterious hand he dares not question that leads to his ruin; a man hunts angels to consume as holiday delicacies—these are a few examples from Papp-Zakor’s masterfully invented worlds in Angel Dinner. They also, somehow, express contemporary reality. Reading this compact, intense collection will delight, frighten then linger in consciousness like an unforgettable song.”
— Douglas Unger, Author of Leaving the Land; Finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Education Chair at Words Without Borders
“Ilka Papp-Zakor's hauntingly original and soul-stirring prose, in Tímea Sipos's dazzling translation, makes you want to look away, but you can't. Her beautiful short stories force themselves into the depth of your soulas if sneaking through a door that has been accidentally left ajar. Twisted, creative, and bleakly inventive, these stories send the most delightful shiver up your spine. The darkly playful threads running through the fabric of her narrative compel you to reconsider the necessity and the importance of facing the uncomfortable. Her whimsical writing style rises to the task of portraying unusual and visceral images that, strangely enough, provoke you to crave more.”
— Ági Bori, Translator of Prima Primissima Award and Attila József Prize Winner Miklós Vámos; Translation Editor at the Los Angeles Review
“I found that with each story of Angel Dinner, I was taught to open my mind to new boundaries and rules. The borders of reality within these stories exist slightly outside ours, and each narrator’s perception appears slightly untrustworthy. Each read, I would start with a question that I would fixatedly try to answer, only to realize by the end that this question was wholly unimportant. With each story’s close, I felt as if I had been left inside a snapshot, privy to a fragile experience. Angel Dinner will teach readers to strip away their assumptions, and to accept the new, fragile reality that Ilka Papp-Zakor creates. It is a testament to the talent of both the writer and translator Tímea Sipos that each story’s voice is so immersive, honest and unique.”
— Kris Herbert, Translator of Deep Breath by Rita Halász
“This daring collection drops you into an off-kilter world, one that is curious and surreal. Papp-Zakor delves into the complex fray of desire, entanglement, alienation, and yearning. Each story unsettles the reader in unexpected ways. They are the kind of stories that haunt you long after you're done. Sipos’s deft translation introduces this author to a wider audience. More please.”
— Michele Tracy Berger, Author of Doll Seed: Stories
“When we read short stories, we hope for the memorable. When I read Sipos’s translation of Papp-Zakor’s Angel Dinner, I’m startled, surprised, and haunted by the metaphors of what we do for family. Wildly inventive, Angel Dinner is a true unforgettable pleasure to read.”
— Joe Milan, Jr., Author of The All-American
“Angel Dinner is a newly translated collection of whimsical, otherworldly tales that blur the line between animal and human. With vivid imagery, introspective narration, and exquisite precision, these stories create a world that feels both fantastical and deeply grounded. I was captivated from beginning to end, and the magic in the stories lingered long after I finished them.”
— Hope Reese, Author of The Women Are Not Fine: The Dark History of a Poisonous Sisterhood
“I’d never before read anything quite like the wondrous, unsettling stories of Ilka Papp-Zakor’s Angel Dinner as rendered into English by Tímea Sipos. The collection’s sure-footed sentences lead us along their paths to landings as inevitable as they are surprising: ‘My son, who lives in New York, will bring me a cat made of tin to distract people from the hole in the gutter.’ These stories transport us eye-level to liminal spaces— between animal and human, flowers and fur, dentistry and chess, kettle and treasure—leaving us transformed in the process. And the ground we walk on is transformed too, and the bright, sparkling air, charged and changed, infused with Angel Dinner’s marvels. I recommend that you buckle up and read this book.”
— Raphael Dagold, Author of Bastard Heart
“A quintessentially authentic and contemporary Hungarian work. A post-humanist fever dream that is carried to its conclusion on undulating waves of parable and symbolic horror.”
— Duncan Robertson, Author of Visegrad
About the Author:
Ilka Papp-Zakor was born in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania and was thirteen when she published her first short story in Korunk. She studied Russian and Hungarian philology at Babeș-Bolyai University. After earning her MA in Hungarian, she moved to Helsinki, Finland, where she semi-officially attended biology courses at the local university and trained rats. Angel Dinner was her first book and the winner of the 2015 JAK-Kendő Award. Papp-Zakor has since produced a second short story collection, The Last Zoo (2018), and two novels, When It Freezes (2021) and The Ventriloquist Looks for an Echo (2024), all published by Kalligram. She was a participant in the Visegrad Literary Residency Program and the Akademie Schloss Solitude Residency. Papp-Zakor was the winner of the 2026 Hazai Attila Literary Prize and one of three finalists for the 2018 Horváth Péter Literary Fellowship. She translates the Polish writers Jerzy Pilch and Janusz Głowacki. She lives in Budapest with her husband and their two dogs.
About the Translator:
Tímea Sipos is a Budapest-born, Hungarian-American literary translator and author of the 2024 poetry chapbook The Shapes Our Tongues Make. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a certificate of translation from the Balassi Institute in Budapest. Her writing and translations appear in Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Asymptote, and Passages North, among others. Her work has received support from MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, PEN/Heim, and more. Her translation of Kinga Tóth’s Offspring appeared in 2020 with YAMA Art and her translation of Márton Simon’s Songs for 3:45 AM was published by The Offending Adam in 2021 as well as Okapi Press in 2025. Her co-translation of BOX by Kornélia Deres is forthcoming with Zephyr Press in 2027. Learn more about her at www.timeasipos.com.
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