Culture.pl presents the latest English-language editions of contemporary Polish literature
Dorota Masłowska's Honey, I Killed our Cats
The latest novel from Poland's literary enfant terrible takes place within the American pop imaginarium, weaving an urban tale of two independent young women through the author's signature lexicon of street slang and mass media-driven lingo. The portrait of the modern world painted by Dorota Masłowska isn't a flattering one. It is a world full of shrieks and yell, guffaws and snickers, broken heels and beer bottles, popping champagne corks, cocaine sniffed off of toilets and the rubbery snap of condoms.
Honey, I Killed our Cats
By Dorota Masłowska
Publisher Noir sur Blanc
Publishing date: October 2012
Paweł Huelle: Cold Sea Stories
Cold Sea Stories sees the much-loved Polish author at the peak of his powers, tackling the big themes of life, politics, loss and love, with wit, wisdom and supreme artistry. The stories are unified by a common theme - each features a book, from works of major religious significance, such as the Bible, the Torah, or the I-Ching, to the catalogue issued by a toy shop. In the Cold Sea Stories series, the author incorporates the history and mythology of the Baltic Coast with contemporary political events. Huelle weaves a delightful imaginative landscape in which monumental historical upheavals and the personal crisis of his characters carry equal weight.
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Cold Sea Stories
By Paweł Huelle
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Comma Press
Publishing date: March 2011
Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s A Grain of Truth
In the long-awaited second crime novel, the prosecutor Teodor Szacki is no longer working in Warsaw - he has said goodbye to his family and to his career in the capital and moved to Sandomierz, a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Hoping to start a "brave new life", Szacki instead finds himself investigating a strange murder case in surroundings both alien and unfriendly.
In his investigation Szacki must wrestle with the painful tangle of Polish-Jewish relations and something that happened more than sixty years earlier.
Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1975 Zygmunt Miloszewski made his debut with the highly acclaimed novel The Intercom in 2005. A Grain of Truth is the continuation of the writer’s first crime novel, Entanglement from 2007. On the strength of A Grain of Truth, Miłoszewski was nominated for the prestigious 'Passport Polityka' award given annually to writers under the age of 40.
Read more on A Grain of Truth
A Grain of Truth
By Zygmunt Miłoszewski
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Published by Bitter Lemon Press (August 2012)
The Minotaur’s Head by Marek Krajewski
The thriller is a departure from Krajewski’s three previous novels: Death in Breslau, The End of the World in Breslau, and Phantoms of Breslau. Eberhard Mock is a bit of a character. Epicure, classicist, bon viveur, hedonist, not exactly the ideal husband, equally at home in the underworld as in the ranks of authority, he is without doubt the most outrageous and original detective in the wide world of crime fiction. And he’s back . . . A particularly vicious murder leads Mock (now in 1939 an Abwehr Captain) to Lwów – now Lviv and part of Ukraine, then a Polish city – where a number of similar cases have been reported. In Poland it is his privilege to work with Commissioner Popielski, a fellow classicist who relies on a particularly unorthodox method of deduction. But by the end of the whole affair, a particularly sordid case even by Mock’s standards, it is his underworld connections that get the job done.
Marek Krajewski was born in Wroclaw and worked for many years as a lecturer in Classical Studies at the city’s university, before turning to crime writing with the Eberhard Mock Investigations. He draw on the city’s rich and dark recent history in framing his larger than life detective.
Read more on The Minotaur’s Head
The Minotaur's Head
By Marek Krajewski
Translated by Danusia Stok
Published by Quercus / MacLehose Press (August 2012)
Black Square by Tadeusz Dabrowski
The 1979-born poet Tadeusz Dabrowski has already had his works translated into thirteen languages and featured in numerous prominent magazines. Black Square is the first collection of Dabrowski’s poems published in English. The selection is accompanied by a preface from Tomasz Różycki and an afterword by the translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The volume comes with cover recommendations by Adam Zagajewski and Timothy Donnelly, a poet and editor of the Boston Review.
Read more on the Black Square
Black Square
Tadeusz Dąbrowski
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Published by Zephyr Press (2011)
www.zephyrpress.org
ISBN 978-0-9815521-6-3
Wilhelm Dichter: God's Horse and The Atheists' School
Born in 1935 in the now-Ukrainian town of Boryslav, Wilhelm Dichter has been living in the US since 1968, settling near the city of Boston. He began writing his autobiographical novels after the age of 60, although he previously published popular science works. God's Horse and The Atheists' School comprises two pieces of the author’s autobiographical prose, dating from 1996 and 1999 respectively. God’s Horse is based on the author’s experiences of the war, the nazi occupation and the beginnings of a new political system in a post-war Poland, all seen through the eyes of a child. The action of Atheists’ School takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The protagonist is now a teenager, and he is infatuated with the new ideals of communism.
Read more on Wilhelm Dichter at BookExpo America: God's Horse and The Atheists' School
God's Horse and The Atheists' School
By Wilhelm Dichter
Translated by Madeline G. Levine
Northwestern University Press, 2012
nupress.northwestern.edu
ISBN 978-0-8101-2793-7
Nowolipie Street by Józef Hen
Hen's memoir depicts growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw's Muranów district during the 1920s and '30s, up to the first months of the German occupation. Nowolipie Street where Hen lived as a child and young adult sets the backdrop and source material for his narration. Hen revives in realistic detail the everyday of a Jewish metropolis, while delving into the inner life of a boy who would grow up to become a writer. The writer also devotes a chapter of the book to his collaboration with Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), a children's newspaper run by Janusz Korczak.
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Nowolipie Street / Nowolipie
By Józef Hen
Translated by Katarzyna Boron
DL Books, 2012 - dlbooksonline.com
ISBN 978-0-9851045-0-4, e-book: ISBN 978-0-9851045-1
Jacek Hugo-Bader’s White Fever
The book tells the story of a winter journey across Siberia. From Moscow to Vladivostok in a modified Russian hammer-reparable Jeep the author takes us, as the Telegraph puts it, "across a land that is slowly dying and populated by the homeless and the hopeless". Polish writer Mariusz Wilk adds "the post Soviet world described by Jacek Hugo-Bader is a reality in delirium tremens…Tourists don’t venture into these areas, travel agencies don’t recommend such places. It’s a space filled with vagabonds of all sorts".
Read more on White Fever Nominated for 2012 Dolman Travel Book of the Year
White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia
By Jacek Hugo-Bader
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Portobello Books, 2011 - www.portobellobooks.com
ISBN 978-1846272-691
Portobello Books, 2012 - www.portobellobooks.com
ISBN 978-1846272-707
Wojciech Jagielski’s The Night Wanderers
The Night Wanderers is framed by a compelling account of the experience of one child forced to commit horrific acts of brutality as a soldier in the rebel forces of Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Kony claims to commune with spirits and controls his subordinates through sheer terror. Along the way, Jagielski outlines the history of Uganda and the cultural and political context in which someone like Kony could come to command such a formidable force. Jagielski also provides a vivid impression of the dilemmas that face a journalist from the outside, trying to break into an unfamiliar world.
Read more on A Reporter's Perspective on War. Jagielski's Night Wanderers in the US
The Night Wanderers. Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Seven Stories Press, 2012 - www.sevenstories.com
ISBN 978-1-60980-350-6, 978-1-908699-08-4 (Old Street Publishing), e-book: ISBN 978-1-60980-361-2
Towers of Stone by Wojciech Jagielski
Born in 1960, Wojciech Jagielski served as a foreign correspondent for Poland's leading independent daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza from 1991 to 2012, reporting mainly from conflict zones in the Transcaucasus, Central Asia, and Africa. His Towers of Stone, a tragic tale of Chechnya won the Italian Literatura Frontera Award.
The author writes about Maskhadov, a politician paralysed with the ideas of what his actions may bring about, and about Basayev, a politician who couldn’t care less about consequences. The Economist’s review of the book acknowledged the way Jagielski avoids cliches and saw his familiarity of the world he describes as a real merit.
Towers of Stone. The Battle of Wills in Chechnya
Translated by Soren A. Gauger
Seven Stories Press, 2009 - www.sevenstories.com
ISBN 978-1-58322-900-2
A Polish Book of Monsters, selected by Michael Kandel
According to literalab’s review, A Polish Book of Monsters "indicates that not only do Polish writers have a good handle on the imaginary breed of monsters but that, as it turns out, the historical monsters the country has experienced have proven to be highly influential in their creation.
These five stories that provide a rare and welcome glimpse into the world of Polish fantasy writing for English-language readers (…) The presence of monstrous beings are one unifying feature in the five stories in this collection. Another though is the hard-bitten outsider always on the verge of violence, as if a gunslinger from a Sergio Leone Western was transported to a world of magic spells and swordplay." The collection includes such titles as Andrzej Sapkowski’s Spellmaker, Tomasz Kołodziejczak’s Key of Passage, The Iron General from Jacek Dukaj, Andrzej Zimniak’s A Cage Full of Angels and Marek S. Huberath’s Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo.
Read more on Poland Shortlisted for US Sci-Fi and Fantasy Translation Awards
A Polish Book of Monsters
Translated and selected by Michael Kandel
PIASA Books, 2010 - www.piasa.org
ISBN: 978-0940962705
Antoni Libera's Madame
Born in 1949, Antoni Libera has been occupied with Samuel Beckett's works for many years, which he has translated into Polish and directed on stage. Set in the late sixties, the main character of the play Madame is a high school student, who falls in love with his French teacher. He is well-read in French literature, which enables him to establish a rapport with the tutor. He wants to get closer to the woman, therefore he decides to learn as much as possible about her. The knowledge he will obtain will influence his life and the decisions he will make in the future.
Madame is one of the most popular books of the last decade. It was printed in over one hundred thousand copies and was translated into twenty languages. It won the Andrzej Kijowski Prize and in 2002 reached the final stage of selection of the Irish IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
See more on the staging of Madame in Warsaw
Madame
Translated by Agnieszka Kołakowska
Canongate Books, 2004 - www.canongate.tv
ISBN 978-1841955209
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Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Entaglement
The best Polish detective novel of 2007, Entaglement was awarded the Grand Prize at the Crime-Fiction Festival in Kraków. Its hero is a Warsaw public prosecutor in his thirties, who comes to unravel the mysterious death of a participant of an unconventional group therapy session. A seemingly routine investigation turns into a fascinating intellectual game, leading not only to the circle of people involved in it, but pressing problems affecting the present. Because of this, Entanglement is not so much a classic detective story, as a suspense novel with a political subtext. Its assertion is perhaps not too revealing, but the thesis, simply put, raises more emotions.
Read more on the screening of Entaglement
Entanglement
Translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones
Bitter Lemon Press, 2010 - www.bitterlemonpress.com
ISBN 9781904738442
Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone
A masterpiece of postwar Polish literature, Stone Upon Stone is Wiesław Myśliwski's grand epic in the rural tradition - a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man's connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive. Wise and impetuous, plain-spoken and compassionate Szymek Pietruszka recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother. Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek's narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered yet who loves life to the very core.
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Stone Upon Stone
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2010 - www.archipelagobooks.com
ISBN 978-0-9826246-2-3
Sobbing superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz
The collection is accompanied by an introduction from Edward Hirsch, an American poet and critic. Hirsch names Różewicz an "Anti-poet, who speaks the truth in a ruthless manner, even if this truth is painful". The critic goes on to call him "A poet of dark refusals. A naked, impure poet. A poet speaking from the margins", and a "bemused seer of nothingness."
The collection borrows its title from the poem Sobbing Superpower, which was released in the Szara Strefa (Grey Zone) volume in 2002.
Read more on Sobbing Superpower Nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize
Sobbing superpower. Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak
W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 - books.wwnorton.com
ISBN 978-0-393-06779-8
Wisława Szymborska’s Here
Here presents 27 poems from the Polish edition of "Tutaj", published by SIW "Znak" in 2009. Poems are presented in the original Polish and in the English-language translation on the facing page. The linguistic precision of this poetry reflects an extraordinary concentration of thought and imagination, and the poems offer a striking abundance of detail of the visible (and invisible) world that keeps amazing the poet. Indeed, amazement seems to be the key to Szymborska's poetry, and it comes from her gift of attentive observation and of seeing things as if for the first time, without the burden of axioms, certainties or accumulated knowledge.
Here
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010 - houghtonmifflinbooks.com
ISBN 978-0-547-36461-2, e-book: ISBN 978-0-547-50464-3
Wojciech Tochman’s Like Eating a Stone
Tochman has returned to Bosnia on multiple occasions to observe the aftermath of the war. The author draws a portrayal of women whose close ones died during the war or who were committed to mitigate its effects. The women turn out to be the strongest as they must be the strongest, just as Ewa Klonowski, a Pole who works identifying the bodies. Writers like Tochman work to make sure the world does not forget what Bosnia has tried to hide away from the world. Like Eating a Stone was one of seven finalists for the NIKE Literary Prize 2003 and a finalist for the prestigious Prix RFI "Témoin du Monde" awarded by Radio France International in Paris (2004).
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Like Eating A Stone
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Portobello Books, 2009 - www.portobellobooks.com
ISBN 978-1846270888
Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times
First published in Poland in 1996, the novel is already regarded as a classic of East European post-Communist fiction, winning many prizes and becoming compulsory reading for high school students in Poland. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the Polish literary market was flooded with previously censored works and translations of formerly forbidden literature from the US and Western Europe, and writers no longer had the Communist regime to push against, Tokarczuk represented a genuinely fresh current in Polish literature, taking a self-consciously woman-centered perspective and moving away from the old politics to consider the relation between cultural archetypes and the events of history.
Read more on Olga Tokarczuk Discuses Primeval and Other Times in New York
Primeval and Other Times
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, 2010 - www.twistedspoon.com
ISBN 978-80-86264-35-6
Magdalena Tulli's In Red
Tulli’s second novel confirms the Polish writer's talent for evoking invented worlds that vanish almost as quickly as they appear. In Red is set in the mythical town of Stitchings in Poland after a Swedish invasion and the fourth partition of Poland. It is a "possible world", which in many ways resembles the real world, but is not fixed or permanent.
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In Red
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2011 - www.archipelagobooks.com
ISBN 978-1-935744085, e-book: ISBN: 978-1935744436
Illegal Liaisons by Grażyna Plebanek
A passionate novel of unstoppable physical obsession amongst a group of Brussels eurocrats, Illegal Liaisons offers a fascinating insight into the first Polish generation that is truly 'free', but struggle to know where the boundaries of that freedom lie. Plebanek writes about sex in an unembarrassed way, asking uncomfortable questions about what is moral. Her characters have to negotiate between the old-fashioned devout Catholicism they grew up with, and the modern way of living they are desperate to embrace. Watch them as they try to claim their rightful place within the international crowd in the big world that turns out to be really rather small. Expect the upending of stereotypes, a fair amount of profanity and a good share of smut.
Illegal Liasons
By Grażyna Plebanek
Translated by Danusia Stok
Stork Press, October 2012
ISBN:978-0-9571326-2-7
eBook:978-0-9571326-3-4
http://storkpress.co.uk
Magdalena Tulli's Flaw
The review of the novel from David Varno reveals that in Tulli's story, a chronicle of the disruption of an unnamed city caused by economic collapse and the appearance of refugees, fully engages the reader in the author's meditation on story. "The work opens with a rendering of a tailor, in whose shop-window hang the cloaks and uniforms for the characters that the tailor will stitch. Soon the point of view shifts to the first person, taking the voice of a set designer, and the rest of the city is drawn on plywood backgrounds, a skeletal, provisional environment that brings to mind the naked sound stage of Lars Van Triers’s film Dogville". The book is a finalist of the Nike Literary Award in 2007.
Flaw
By Magdalena Tulli
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2007
www.archipelagobooks.com
ISBN 978-0-9793330-1-9
Magdalena Tulli: Moving Parts
A feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will. This thought-provoking, wryly humorous work from the acclaimed author of Dreams and Stones tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer us for describing and understanding it. A 2004 Nike laureate, and a nominee for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Moving Parts
By Magdalena Tulli
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2005
www.archipelagobooks.com
ISBN 978-0-9763950-0-3
Magdalena Tulli: Dreams and Stones
Hailed as one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism, Dreams and Stones won the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize in Poland in 1995. Telling the story of the growth of a great city, Tulli relates its history by entering the lives of the stones from which the buildings and monuments are constructed, as well as the dreams of people and objects interwoven with the city’s history. Revealing the inner lives of buildings, mirrors and news-paper -photographs, she explores the design of the city, its growth and its workings. Dismantling the city piece by piece, Tulli reveals a very different metaphysical landscape lying, literally, beneath and around it. The translator Bill Johnston was presented with the award of American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages for his rendition of the novel into English.
Read more on Dreams and Stones
Dreams and Stones
By Magdalena Tulli
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2004
www.archipelagobooks.com
ISBN 978-0-9728692-6-3
Michał Witkowski: Lovetown
Growing up queer in a communist state, queens Patricia and Lucretia spent the 70s and 80s underground, finding glamour in the squalor, strutting their stuff in parks and public toilets, seducing hard Soviet soldiers, preying on drunks, and seeing their friends die of AIDS.Today they're about to hit Lovetown, a homo-haven, populated by a younger generation of emancipated gays, who are out and proud in their post-communist paradise: suntanned, sculpted and vigorously spending the pink euro.This is the story of the clash between old and new gays - the clapped out queens and the flashy fags - as they meet in a place where anything goes, butsome things have also been lost. The first edition of Lovetown in 2011 was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Lovetown
Translated by William Martin
Portobello Books, 2011
www.portobellobooks.com
ISBN 978-1846270-529
Editor: Paulina Schlosser