The translation of Felicja Kruszewska's A Dream introduces a major play by a twentieth-century female playwright to the English-speaking world. On March 7, 1927 A Dream - a large-scale expressionistic drama by an unknown poet - burst on the Polish theatrical scene in a dazzling debut production by the young actor Edmund Wiercinski, who would become one of the outstanding directors of his time. The play's hallucinatory visions of the rise of fascism and the heroine's longing for a providential savior on a white horse spoke directly to Polish audiences about their deepest anxieties. During the next two years A Dream received three additional stagings and became the subject of lively debate and controversy. The play, which has been successfully revived in 1974, is an outstanding example of European expressionism. The volume also contains An Excursion to the Museum, by the contemporary Polish poet, playwright, and short-story writer Tadeusz Rozewicz. A disturbing account of an utterly mundane visit to Auschwitz, the tale is a brilliant example of the playwright's technique of poetic collage.

The translation of Felicja Kruszewska's A Dream introduces a major play by a twentieth-century female playwright to the English-speaking world. On March 7, 1927 A Dream - a large-scale expressionistic drama by an unknown poet - burst on the Polish theatrical scene in a dazzling debut production by the young actor Edmund Wiercinski, who would become one of the outstanding directors of his time. The play's hallucinatory visions of the rise of fascism and the heroine's longing for a providential savior on a white horse spoke directly to Polish audiences about their deepest anxieties. During the next two years A Dream received three additional stagings and became the subject of lively debate and controversy. The play, which has been successfully revived in 1974, is an outstanding example of European expressionism.
The volume also contains An Excursion to the Museum, by the contemporary Polish poet, playwright, and short-story writer Tadeusz Rozewicz. A disturbing account of an utterly mundane visit to Auschwitz, the tale is a brilliant example of the playwright's technique of poetic collage.

In the first English translation of Still Alive, the renowned Polish essayist and theater critic Jan Kott recounts his perilous odyssey through the endless political crises of Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth-century, illuminating not only the fate of a whole generation of intellectuals, but also his main concern: how to make sense of one's own existence As a portrayal of turbulent times, the book is priceless, in particular because of its extraordinarily vivid depictions of the atmosphere of everyday life under Communism.-Stanislaw Baranczak, Harvard University An incisive and vivid testimony of a gifted and zestful survival, Still Alive offers a suspenseful story of its author's harrowingly narrow escapes in Nazi-occupied Poland, and an illuminating account of his vicissitudes under the postwar Communist regime. That this widely acclaimed memoir is now available in English is good news indeed.-Victor Erlich, professor emeritus of Russian literature, Yale University Written by a man with literary taste and a sense of the dramatic who knows how to tell a story without ever losing a sense of humor, taste for life, and a kind of gaiety.-Nicole Zand, Le Monde The entire writing resonates with life and its mysteries, some resolved, some not...The rigors and victories of Kott's life somehow offer sustenance to all who question existence.-Library Journal A splendid evocation by an eminent theater critic and philosopher of what it meant to be alive-sometimes barely-during the tremendous upheavals in Europe caused by the Second World War and the installation of the Communist regime in Poland...Kott shows an unerring sense of the telling detail that imprints a scene in the memory. A riveting book.-Kirkus Reviews

From Russia comes this ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable by Vassily Aksyonov. Your Murderer is a richly grotesque hodgepodge of different linguistic levels that defies all rules and mixes a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense.
Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theater and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. He is the Editor of Slavic and East European Performance and of harwood academic publishers's Polish and East European Theater Archive series.
Your Murderer comes from Russia and is an ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable - richly grotesque and on different linguistic levels. that defies all rules, mixing a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense.