---

Contents

To Young Men Without Lovers
1 On Faith and Friendliness
2 On War and Prostitution
3 On Pride and Being Thirteen
4 On Young Girls
5 On Courage and Seeking Advice
6 On Becoming a Lover
7 On Being Promiscuous and Lonely
8 On Being Vain and Hopelessly in Love
9 On Don Juan's Secret
10 On Taking it Easy
11 On Virgins
12 On the Deadly Sin of Sloth
13 On Mothers of Little Children
14 On Anxiety and Rebellion
15 On Happiness with a Frigid Woman
16 On Grown Women as Teenage Girls
17 On More than Enough

---

Foreword

Born in Hungary, Stephen Vizinczey was two years old when his father was assassinated by the Nazis; two decades later his uncle was murdered by the communists. During his student years, he was a poet and playwright, and three of his plays were banned by the regime. One won the Attila József Prize, but the police raided the theatre during dress rehearsal and seized all copies of the script. Vizinczey fought in the defeated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and fled to the West, speaking only about fifty words of English. Since then, 'like Conrad and Nabokov, he has risen to the ranks of those foreigners who handle English in a way to make a native Anglophone pale with jealousy' (Leslie Hanscom, New York Newsday), and 'can teach the English how to write English' (Anthony Burgess). He learned the language writing scripts for the National Film Board of Canada. Subsequently, he founded and edited the Canadian literary-political magazine Exchange, and joined CBC / Radio Canada as a writer and producer in Toronto.

In 1965 he quit his job, borrowed money to publish his first novel In Praise of Older Women (planning to commit suicide if it failed) and distributed it by car and through the post. It became the first and only self-published and self-distributed novel to top the bestseller lists in the history of Canadian literature. Its subsequent publication and success in Britain the following year drew worldwide attention to the novel and it became an international bestseller. Ever since it has been regularly reissued in over twenty countries, often in new translations, and has acquired a reputation as a modern classic. In 2001, In Praise of Older Women was described by Pierre Lepape in Le Monde as 'a masterpiece ... a 'dazzling novel'. It received the Elba Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy in 2004. It has been filmed twice. The novel's success in Britain and elsewhere in the late 1960s did not bring much material benefit to the author, and he had to fight a seven-year lawsuit to regain his rights from a New York publisher. His personal experience of turning success into disaster in the 1960s inspired his second book. The Rules of Chaos (1969) is a philosophical reflection on the relationship between individual as well as governmental actions and results. Based on his theory, heavily influenced by Tolstoy, he predicted in a 1968 article in the Spectator that America would fail in Vietnam, in spite of the massive superiority of American power against an immeasurably smaller and weaker country 'Weapons are means of destruction not means of control,' he wrote. 'Power weakens as it grows.'

Always out of step with prevailing notions of both popular and high art, Vizinczey's second novel, An Innocent Millionaire was rejected by scores of publishers before it was eventually published in 1983. Welcomed enthusiastically by Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess and most critics in Britain, it was hailed throughout the world by writers and critics, who compared it to the nineteenth-century classics, notably Stendhal and Balzac. His collection of reviews and essays, written mostly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Times in the late 1960s and 1970s, was published under the title Truth and Lies in Literature (1986) and continues to be reprinted in translations to this day, particularly in continental Europe and Latin America. His books have sold six million copies around the world, and he is now considered 'one of the great contemporary writers who makes the crucial themes of our times his own and transforms them into the stuff of fiction with humour and passion' (Sergio Vila-Sanjuan, La Vanguardia).

In Praise of Older Women is the first of his books being reissued in Penguin Modern Classics.

---