What others say:

These two novellas, set 50 years apart, separately explore the rarefied, if perilous, nexus between sex, spirituality, and death. Both also fixate on the amplified allure of (almost) unattainable actresses and suppose the possibility of redemption through death. In the first, set in the Budapest of the 1930s, a tormented Catholic priest aches for a surprisingly vulnerable stage diva through whom he soars closer to God than he will ever again feel in the pulpit. In the second, the diva's 1980s analogue plunges a young mechanic-screenwriter's life into ecstatic chaos, transforming his guilty conscience into another piece of scenery. These parallel encounters with the "pre-budding ecstasy of nature" may be profoundly religious, or deeply blasphemous, or perhaps both. Historically minded readers not too distracted by Palyi's lush, electric sex scenes will notice that these stories bookend nicely Hungary's totalitarian period and may be conceived as gutsy and exotic, if somewhat minimalist, commentary on the years in between.

— Brendan Driscoll, Booklist

What Andras Palyi does in his potent and flavorful fiction is, as Peter Nadas puts it, "nothing short of tempting God." In his twin novellas "Beyond" and "At the End of the World," Palyi creates a spiritually and sexually charged fictional world ruled by a pair of self-styled goddesses.

— Elizabeth Searle, American Book Review

There is not the slightest doubt that what András Pályi has been doing is nothing short of tempting God. It is impossible to read him without a feeling of reverential dread. He blasphemes, he challenges and wages war against God. As a spiritual author, not only does he belong with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Buber, Weil, Blixen, and Pilinszky, but, except for Kurtág, Pályi is the only contemporary Hungarian mystic writer.

— Péter Nádas

No chance motifs here (and no innocent ones, either!), there is sin, therefore there is also law which can be violated. He is passionately attached to objects and, even more, to matter, to anything perceivable by the senses. He is one of the most important figures of contemporary Hungarian literature. András Pályi is inimitably good. Recommended way of reading him: with bated breath.

— Péter Esterházy

Alongside Péter Nádas, Pályi is the sole consistent cultivator of ecstatic prose in Hungary.

— József Tamás Reményi, Népszabadság

Pályi's heroes cross over to the other side of the complete bodily experience. They cross the void as well, which destroys them. They cannot bear the difficult knowledge of the sometimes temple-like, sometimes prison-like bodily existence. In Pályi's masterful narration, their stories remain void of solution.

— Hungarian Literature Online

If you could imagine an Eastern European William Faulkner on powerful aphrodisiacs [...] Out of Oneself might be something he'd write.

— Absinthe Literary Review