Journey through Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, and other places neglected by tourists, with "an accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail" (Irvine Welsh).Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. By car, train, bus, and ferry, he goes from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine—to small towns and villages with strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," he tells us, "beats in Sokolów P...

Ingenious essays from "a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept . . . from free will to probability theory" ( The New York Times Book Review).In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem steps outside of his fictional comfort zone to try his hand at reviewing the literature of others. The only catch is this: None of these books have actually been published—or even written—he just made them up.These sixteen satiri...

The absurdly brilliant far-future satire from "the Borges of scientific culture" ( Time).The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet's written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entert...

Nest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from contemporary Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. This metafictional adventure, owing as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, describes a world where every thirty-five years, all residents must move to a new “Land,” each a rigid caste society based on hair color, and each person bears a Significant Name that foretells the manner of their deaths. As new arrivals in the lan...

DescriptionNest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from contemporary Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. This metafictional adventure, owing as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, describes a world where every 35 years, all residents must move to a new “Land”, each a rigid caste society based on hair color, and each person bears a Significant Name that foretells the manner of their deaths. ...

Conjuring worlds in which robots are kings and Earthlings exist on the fringes of the universe, Stanisław Lem's anachronistic fairy tales and science fiction parables envision knights who fight for the favor of a mechanical princess, a computer that can create anything (so long as it begins with the letter n), and a human astronaut who goes undercover on a planet ruled by robots. In celebrated translations by Michael Kandel and with a new introduction by Bożena Shallcross, the sto...

A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem.With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insec...

This book addresses Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, and particularly their points of similarity and difference, congruence and conflict. The city of Jerusalem stands at the heart of both these age-old faiths, but today it is a divided city in which Jews and Orthodox Christians seem to find themselves on opposite sides of history. Must this story be one of continuing conflict, or is there scope for reconciliation and common effort? How do religions that cherish tradition face up to the c...

By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,” which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal...

The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh....

The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evo...

Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I've discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there's more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my—what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly...