From Powells.com
Travel the globe with these not-to-be-missed titles.
Staff Pick
Dreamlike, sensually beautiful prose from yet another bright light whom we lost in the Holocaust. Recommended By Jennifer K., Powells.com
Schulz is a master of metaphor, and his lush, poetic sentences burst with sensory detail. He transforms the pedestrian — salesgirls, brooms, bolts of cloth — into fantastic apparitions, lit with significance and color. His stories involve rare birds' eggs, bicycles, and a quarter of the city that is gray and does not exactly exist. They are about reality and illusion, the perversion of order, and the luxurious overgrowth of imagination. They are quite possibly like nothing you've ever read before. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The collected fiction of “one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe” (Cynthia Ozick).
Bruno Schulz’s untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz’s original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and influential writers.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Review
“Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art strikes us-stuns us, even-with its overload of beauty.” John Updike
Review
“A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw.” The New York Review of Books
Review
“Every time I open his books, I’m amazed anew to discover how this writer, a single human being who rarely left his home town, created for us an entire world, an alternate dimension of reality. . . . His [stories] create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main character of the stories and is the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. . . . On every page, life [is] raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name.” David Grossman, The New Yorker
About the Author
Bruno Schulz, (1892-1942) wrote stories, assorted criticism, and a lost work thought to be called
The Messiah.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
David A. Goldfarb taught for eight years in the Slavic department at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Celina Wieniewska is an award-winning translator.