The prose of Bruno Schulz is renowned for its originality. His expressionistic stories, set in a fantastical space reminiscent of his hometown, poetically elevate the ordinary to the realm of myth. His usual themes – the wind, a piece of clothing, a plate of fish – suddenly appear mysterious, bizarre, and capable of illuminating deeper truths.
As the father notes somewhere, one of the most appealing characters created by the author, "material possesses an endless fertility, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time a captivating power of temptation that sweeps us into creating forms." This volume includes his two published short story collections, The Stores of Cinnamon and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as his other writings, which complement the valuable body of his literary production.
Bruno Schulz, an authentic magician of the Polish language, who has been compared to Kafka and Proust, reveals the processes of memory and human consciousness with a stunning mastery. His language is fused with the atmosphere and precision of dreams.
"We find it difficult to categorize Schulz. We can describe him as a surrealist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a modernist... He writes sometimes like Kafka and sometimes like Proust, and he occasionally manages to delve into depths that neither of them ever reached... If they had allowed Schulz to exhaust his life, he might have bequeathed us unspeakable treasures, but what he was able to deposit in his brief passage through this world is enough to consider him one of the greatest writers who ever existed." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The beautiful, sensitive, and substantial stories of Schulz elevated the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him, but I also hate him, because he remains simply unrivaled. He is the unsurpassed genius of Polish literature." Olga Tokarczuk
"Imaginative, stimulating regarding the grasp of lived experience, refined in style, witty, and imbued with a mystical yet coherent aesthetic of the ideal, Schulz's prose comprises unique literary works that surprise us, appearing as if they emerged from nowhere... Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own innermost life, which is, at the same time, the inner life of childhood memory and artistic creation. From the first flows the charm and originality of his stories, from the second their intellectual power." J. M. Coetzee
"Every time I return to his books, I am always astonished by how this author, an ordinary man who rarely left his hometown, crafted an entire world, an alternative version of reality... His stories create a mesmerizing universe, the private mythology of a family, and they are written with words that overflow with life, with a language that ultimately becomes the protagonist of the narratives, as it constitutes the only dimension in which these stories could exist... Every page of his is exuberant, exploding with a vitality worthy of real life." David Grossman
