Publisher: Natus Books, Barrytown, NY
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group (312) 337-0747
Pub. date: Jan. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781581772296
Format: Hardback
Retail price: $26.95
Dimensions: 5"x7"
No. of pages: 268Eden Revisited:
A Novel
by László Z. Bitó
EDEN REVISITED is Hungarian writer Laszlo Bito’s vivid reimagining of the saga of the Bible’s first family: Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel. This novel immerses readers in a mythic landscape: the Garden of Eden with its “tree of bitter apples,” the forbidden fruit that Bito conceives as having hallucinogenic properties; the Outerworld—a wilderness of cliffs, caves and forests cut off from the wider world by impassable swamps and the Euphrates River, teeming with crocodiles. Further East, beyond the Outerworld, is the peaceful, matriarchal Land of Nod, where, roughly fifteen years before the novel begins, a terrible crime had been committed and a mystery born. Sacrilegious, erotic and inventive—Eden Revisited removes an omnipotent Creator from our origin story and challenges our notions of divinity and innocence. After reading Bito’s novel, readers will never see Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Fall and the immortal question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” in quite the same way.
If fate—namely the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956—had not intervened, László Z. Bitó (1934–2021) would have become a fiction writer. However, because of his involvement as a local organizer, he was forced to flee Hungary and, upon his arrival in the United States—an immigrant without knowledge of English—choose a more practical career. Bitó graduated with a BA in chemistry and biology from Bard College and went on to earn a PhD in in biophysics and cell biology from Columbia University. In 1965, he joined the Ophthalmology faculty of that university and worked in biomedical science. His research led to the development of the drug Xalatan, which for many years has been the gold standard in the treatment of glaucoma. Bitó retired from Columbia at the age of sixty-three to devote his time to writing. By the time of his death he had published more than twenty books in Hungarian; some were translated into German and several Eastern European languages. He produced, among other works, four books based on observations from his own experience, six biblical novels, and five anthologies of previously published essays and editorials. The Gospel of Anonymous, published in 2011, was his first, and until now only, literary book published in English.