Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise "My First Suicide" straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. By turns nostalgic and poetic, these stories combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.

A comic gem, Jerzy Pilchs A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist thaw. The narrator, Jerzyk (little Jerzy), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his fathers closest friend, Mr. Tr?ba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, would-be Polish insurrectionist, and one of the wildest literary characters since Sternes Uncle Toby. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Tr?ba and the narrators nameless father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party, W?adys?aw Gomu?kaassassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme . . .

The comic misadventures of a philanderer and the angry lover in his attic; Dr. Pawel Kohoutek, veterinarian and womanizer, looks out the window one morning to see his mistress approaching his house. That's bad. She is hauling her suitcase (containing her books) and her backpack (containing everything else she owns). That's worse. So Kohoutek does the only thing he can: He hides his current woman in the attic of the family slaughterhouse. Farce ensues as Kohoutek attempts to hide the woman from his eccentric family, the family's lodgers, and various offbeat visitors. The woman, expecting love and children and a future, does not make things easy. As he frantically runs around trying to keep her a secret, Kohoutek's memories - mostly involuntary and (in true postmodern fashion) of questionable accuracy - reveal in hilarious detail the life and crises of a hapless libertine and the forces that created him. A bestseller in the author's native Poland, His Current Woman is a delightful comedy of manners and of what often passes for love.