I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusion...

Waiting for the Dog to Sleep is poet, translator, and scholar Jerzy Ficowski's only collection of prose. In these short stories and sketches Ficowski reinterprets a question posed by the writer central to him, Bruno Schulz, about the mythologization of reality. For Schulz, fiction was a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal. Ficowski's prose seems to reinterpret this approach to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly w...

In the vein of the well-known drug writings of De Quincey and Baudelaire from a century earlier and those of his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Jean Cocteau – and foreshadowing the later writings of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda on psychoactive drugs – Witkacy composed Narcotics in 1930 to discuss and document not only his own experimentation with different substances but the nature of addiction itself and the prevailing social attitude toward drugs, particularly those th...

Considered the enfant terrible of the Polish avant-garde, lauded by critics and scorned by the public, Bruno Jasieński suddenly declared the end of Futurism in Poland soon after his short “novel” The Legs of Izolda Morgan appeared in 1923. An extraordinary example of Futurist prose, this fantastic tale cautions against the machine supplanting the human while the human body is disaggregated into fetishized constituent parts. As central to Jasieński's oeuvre, the text is situated he...

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s work stands among the most remarkable phenomena in post-1989 European theater. This book joins Warlikowski’s theater with the dynamic changes in Polish society following 1989, using strategies borrowed from psychoanalysis, theater anthropology, performance studies, and cultural poetics. This book is not only about an artist of the theater, but above all about the theater production as an object of the audience’s desire, an object evoking fascination, revulsion, aver...

Hymns to Millionaires is Canadian native Soren A. Gauger's first collection of stories. Taking as his raw materials the treatment of the fantastic found in Borges and Kis, the misanthropic musings of Gombrowicz and Bernhard, and a literary understanding of philosophy, Gauger's stories are formally challenging yet very funny. They often deal with the chaotic fragmentation of the individual, who is mindful of both society and literature, while exploring the blank spaces implicit som...

A luminous, groundbreaking biography of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, best known for the poem “Death Fugue.”Paul Celan (1920–1970) was recognized as the greatest poet of the German language shortly before his tragic death just shy of his fiftieth birthday, when he drowned himself in the Seine. He described his “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) as a “tombstone” for his mother, who perished in the Holocaust. Celan’s work is often view...

In Towers of Stone, award-winning Polish reporter Wojciech Jagielski brings into focus the tragedy of Chechnya, its inhabitants, and the war being waged there by a handful of desperate warriors against a powerful and much more numerous army. Jagielski's narrative is told through the lens of two men: Shamil Basaev, a hero to some, a dangerous warlord to others; and Aslan Maskhadov, a calculating and sober politician, who is viewed as a providential savior by some of his compatriots and a co...

The book covers a very special moment in the life of Piotr Michałowski (1800–55), the most outstanding painter of Polish Romanticism. In his early life, Michałowski built a career as a technocrat and later became head of the state-owned heavy industry. At the time, he proved himself a brilliant amateur salon painter. During the anti-Russian uprising of 1830–31, he was responsible for producing weapons for the Polish army, and would later head for France to pursue the arts. This change in h...

The deepest crises cannot destroy the universal model of literariness. It maintains its appeal for participants in literary communication as a «contradictory» model. This thought recurs in many epochs. Literariness involves suspending the formal or logical norms of contradiction (lex contraditionis). In everyday speech, it is not permissible for «A» to simultaneously be «not-A»; in literary structures this is the norm. This is both in the ideas, and in the tensions between the art...

The book covers a very special moment in the life of Piotr Michałowski (1800–55), the most outstanding painter of Polish Romanticism. In his early life, Michałowski built a career as a technocrat and later became head of the state-owned heavy industry. At the time, he proved himself a brilliant amateur salon painter. During the anti-Russian uprising of 1830–31, he was responsible for producing weapons for the Polish army, and would later head for France to pursue the arts. This change in h...

The book answers fundamental questions about the processes of social negotiation of mentality shifts in communist Poland. Taking divorce, single motherhood, domestic violence and abortion as examples, it analyzes the level of acceptance toward tabus grounded in tradition, and the course of negotiating new meanings and using social exclusion when dealing with new phenomena. The author uses not only national documents, but a...