Fiction. Translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski. Born in 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski is primarily known for his work on Bruno Schulz (Regions of the Great Heresy) and his poetry. Not having belonged to any literary school or circle, he occupies a peculiar place in Polish literature, and in these short stories and sketches he takes Schulz1s mythologization of reality, whereby fiction is a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal, and reinterprets it to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, Ficowski hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales--a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

In his monumental photographs, taken with a large-format analogue camera, Pawel Bownik examines "artificiality" in photography. Drawing inspiration from the classic iconography of historical still lifes, genre painting as well as the aesthetics of 1940s American cinema, he questions historical norms of representation. Carefully dissecting the elementary components of his subjects, his work is driven by his attention to minutiae. Flowers are disassembled, only to be surgically reconstructed - without hiding their artificiality. Alternatively, he challenges the historical narratives symbolized by traditional costumes: Turning them inside-out invokes the possibility of a different reading: In their reversed state, the intricate embroideries not only reveal their materiality, but also speak of their socio-historical context. Undercoat encompasses Bownik's work from the past decade, informed by the artist's awareness of the underlying patterns that give form to our surroundings and how we perceive them.

Fiction. Soren A. Gauger's first collection of short stories was entirely written in Krakow, Poland, where he moved four years ago. 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 evasive of post-structuralist clichA a¬As. They often deal with the chaotic fragmentation of the individual, who is mindful of both society and literature, while exploring the blank spaces implicit somewhere behind the narrative.

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 also ego-documents and cultural texts to prove the macrosocietal dictatorship in the years 1956-1989 contributed not to the revolutionization of society at the family level, but to its perpetuation. The family references made by the communist authorities, especially in the last two decades of their regime, can be treated as one of the factors legitimizing the system.

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 artificiality and naturalness of speech, the structure and the chaos of the plot, experimentation and revitalization of tradition, objective observation and a biased vision of the world, its visibility and invisibility, expressibility and inexpressibility, and a realistic and an imaginative focus. Executions of this model are gradative.