Author(s): Bruno Schulz

Short Stories | Translated fiction | Poland

A stunning new collection featuring fresh translations of Bruno Schulz's 15 most captivating short stories, in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition

Includes a new translation of a recently discovered story, believed to be the first-ever published work by this legendary cult writer

The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.

Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the 15 stories in his collection showcases Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his essential status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical:

• August, A Visitation, Birds, Pan, Cinnamon Shops, The Street of Crocodiles, Cockroaches, The Gale, The Night of the Great Season (from Cinnamon Shops)

• The Book, The Age of Genius, A July Night, My Father Joins the Firefighters, Father's Final Escape (from Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass)

• Undula--a new translation of Schulz's recently discovered first published story

 'One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words' - John Updike

'One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe' - Cynthia Ozick

'Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality' - Chris Power

'I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life' - David Grossman

'Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness and at the same time his writing is very complex. [Reading him for the first time] was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him... a great writer' - Alejandro Zambra

Author Biography: Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist, regarded as one of the greatest Polish-language writers of all time. He was born and lived most of his life in the town of Drohobych, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 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 Gestapo officer in 1942, whilst walking home with a loaf of bread. Much of his writing, including his final, unfinished novel The Messiah, was lost in the Holocaust.