Zsófia Bán

Photo by Gáspár Stekovics.

Zsófia Bán is a Hungarian writer, critic, and scholar born in Rio de Janeiro and raised in Brazil and Hungary. Night School: A Reader for Grownups (2019) was translated into English by Jim Tucker. Her work has also been translated into German, Spanish, and other languages. She is an associate professor of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Night School; or The Ancient Art of East European Heavy Breathing

Winter 2020
Zsófia Bán

Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest, Hungary. Photo: Daniel Olah / Unsplash Sometime in the mid-1980s, at the first conference of the European Association of American Studies held behind the Iron...
Night School: A Reader for Grownups by Zsófia Bán

Autumn 2019
Zsófia Bán

Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 240 pages. Hungarian author Zsófia Bán (b. 1957, Rio de Janeiro) fashioned the curious frame of a “night school” to instruct her readers on a long list of rando...
Reclaiming the Body: Hitler’s Bathtub, Son of Saul, and Warsaw Uprising

February 24, 2016 | Zsófia Bán

Géza Röhrig in Son of Saul Nominated for a 2016 Best Foreign Language Oscar, Hungary’s Son of Saul has been called “the film to beat.” Here in her review essay...
Venom

March 2016
Zsófia Bán

Image: © Masha watercolor In this story, Hungarian author Zsófia Bán writes into a little-known episode from Hungary’s tangled and traumatic pre–and post–World War II history, centered a...
The Two Fridas, Zsófia Bán

Zsófia Bán

Sept. 2009 WLT They had us sitting together though we didn’t want to. We even said we didn’t. At that our teacher whisked her cane staff through the air, with an astonishing alacrity given he...