Description

‘One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe’ Cynthia Ozick

The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. Over a city forever altered by the vagaries of history and imagination, great flocks of birds soar, obscuring the sun. Individuals transform into doorbells and insects, seeking shelter from an endless storm. The year sprouts an unexpected thirteenth month.

Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, weaving a darkly modern tapestry of memory, myth and reality, Schulz’s stories confirm his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Stanley Bill.

Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist who has influenced writers including Salman Rushdie, Roberto Bolano, David Grossman and Cynthia Ozick. He was born and lived most of his life in the town of Drohobych, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Poland, and now part of Ukraine. He published two collections of short stories – Cinnamon Shops and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – during his lifetime. Schulz was shot and killed by a German SS officer in Drohobych in 1942. His unfinished novel, The Messiah, was lost in the Holocaust.

Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies and Director of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has translated works by Jacek Dukaj and Czeslaw Milosz’s unfinished novel The Mountains of Parnassus. He is founder and editor-at-large of the news and opinion website Notes from Poland.

Publisher Review

"An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz's oeuvre." -The Washington Post "Stanley Bill's translations come as an invigorating reminder of the uncanny verbal sorcery behind this unique voice and vision.... The results, hauntingly phrased, can be suitably weird-but never impenetrable... Bill catches the outrageous wit of Schulz's nightmare tableaux." -The Wall Street Journal "The supreme virtuoso of Polish fiction... Genius" -Jewish Chronicle