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.

Sixty years after his murder by the Nazis, Bruno Schulz, one of the twentieth century's greatest and most enigmatic writers, is experiencing a renaissance in part occasioned by this biography by the renowned Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski. Widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on Schulz, Ficowski reconstructs the author's life story and evokes the fictional vision of his best-known works, "The Street of Crocodiles" and "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass." Including many of Schulz's paintings and letters as well as new information on the Mossad's removal of Schulz's murals from Poland in 2001, this book will stand for years to come as the definitive account of the author's tragic life. Developed for publication by The Jewish Heritage Project's International Initiative for Literature of the Holocaust.