Imagine it’s possible to breathe life into stone — your hand meets the cool surface of a sculpted man and finds it pulsing with life… This is the Budapest of THE STONE MEN, a vibrantly original debut novel for fans of Clarice Lispector and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark.

THE STONE MEN
by Timea Sipos
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Four female sculptors in their final year of art school discover their ability to animate statues. Their first creation: the ideal man. What starts as a creative experiment grows into a media sensation. Seeing an opportunity, two of the sculptors, Bori and Hajni, begin to monetize their art, sculpting men for wealthy patrons who desire companions. As the operation grows, the streets of Budapest become restless with discarded animate statues, many of whom long for integration into human society. Haunting the novel is a mysterious mass casualty which leaves an untold number of stone men dead.

Through the perspectives of the stone men, their creators, and their occasional human companions, the novel explores the blurred the lines between art and life, female agency and sexuality, and questions what we owe our creations.

Timea Sipos is a Hungarian-American writer and translator with a MFA from the University of Nevada, and studied translation at the Balassi Institute. She has been supported by MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.