Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is
considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between
the two world wars. Celina Wieniewska (translator) was awarded the
1963 Roy Publishers Polish-into-English prize for her translation
of The Street of Crocodiles. Jonathan Safran Foer
(foreword) is the bestselling author of the novels Everything is
Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Here I Am. He
lives in Brooklyn, New York. David A. Goldfarb (introducer)
taught for eight years in the Slavic department at Barnard College,
Columbia University. He has written on a range of writers and
subjects, including Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Nikolai Gogol,
Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and East European
cinema.
"[Schulz's] very beautiful, sensitive, meaningful stories raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there's no way to compete with him. He's the genius of the Polish language." --Olga Tokarczuk, The Guardian
"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
"Bruno Schulz's slim output of stories were all he needed to
publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other
20th-century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges."
--Sjon, Vulture "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 "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 "One of the most original imaginations in
modern Europe." --Cynthia Ozick "Schulz cannot be easily
classified. He can be called a surrealist, a symbolist, an
expressionist, a modernist. . . . He wrote sometimes like Kafka,
sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths
that neither of them reached. . . . If Schulz had been allowed to
live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but
what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the
most remarkable writers who ever lived." --Isaac Bashevis Singer
"Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living
world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but
coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and
startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz
was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which
is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and
his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and
freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual
power." --J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of
Books
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