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Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories
A stunning new collection featuring fresh translations of Bruno Schulz’s 15 most captivating short stories, in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition
Includes a new translation of a recently discovered story, believed to be the first-ever published work by this legendary cult writer
The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.
Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the 15 stories in his collection showcases Schulz’s darkly modern sensibility, and his essential status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.
Includes a new translation of a recently discovered story, believed to be the first-ever published work by this legendary cult writer
The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.
Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the 15 stories in his collection showcases Schulz’s darkly modern sensibility, and his essential status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.
236 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2023
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278 people want to read
About the author
Bruno Schulz
121 books725 followersBruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher of Jewish descent. He was regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century.
At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.
Source: wikipedia.com
At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.
Source: wikipedia.com
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
January 17, 2023
A selection of fourteen stories by legendary artist and writer Bruno Schulz. Originally published in the 1930s, the majority of Schulz’s stories revolve around a family who, like his own family, are Polish Jews living in the small town of Drohobycz (now in Ukraine). The stories are mostly narrated by Józef, first a child, then a young man, whose reflections on his childhood and later experiences are centred on his home town and his now-deceased father Jakub, a local shopkeeper. In some sense these can seem like an attempt to resurrect something of the memory and spirit of Schulz’s own father, although there are glimpses too of his brother, mother and feisty housekeeper Adela. But Schulz’s narratives stray from expected pathways, there’s no sentimentality here, no sustained journey into the past. Instead, Schulz blends realism with the fantastical, filling his writing with images of bizarre transformations and mythic events. The dying, sometimes the dead, Jakub resides somewhere between prophet and Don Quixote figure, caught up in myriad, strange schemes, sometimes shapeshifting into a bird or other animal, sometimes existing outside of time altogether in a place that only slightly resembles reality.
Schulz’s depiction of his surroundings, the seasons, the winding streets, and sinister corners of the town are breathtakingly detailed, so much so it can feel as if he’s conjuring them back into being. His complex, sinuous sentences are filled with striking and disorienting metaphors as in “The Street of Crocodiles” which builds on Drohobycz’s dependence on the oil industry and the disruption of its historical architecture by new, makeshift areas revolving around sales of cheap goods and pornography. A change that, from Schulz’s perspective, results in spaces of spectacle without substance – in real life Drohobycz was dubbed the ‘Galician California’. Here these liminal spaces are represented as degenerate, riddled with the excesses of American consumerist values – his patent horror at this kind of development reminded me of Adorno at times. Although ironically it was his brother’s job in the oil industry that funded Schulz’s early writing. But, as is common with Schulz, these are also fertile places, organised by dreamlike logic, filled with grotesque and magical happenings.
I find some of the attitudes in Schulz’s work jarring and uncomfortable, one example is his portrayal of women, particularly obvious in “Undula” a recently rediscovered piece. But I also love his narratives, so I was a bit uncertain about reading this new set of translations by Stanley Bill – also an expert on Schulz – but I thought they worked really well to communicate Schulz’s singular style, the marvels of his imagination. I think for anyone wanting to revisit Schulz or someone looking for an introduction, this collection’s more than decent. It comes with a useful overview of Schulz’s life and work, in which Bill attempts to provide the wider context often overshadowed by accounts of Schulz's murder by a Gestapo officer during WW2.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Pushkin Press for an ARC
Schulz’s depiction of his surroundings, the seasons, the winding streets, and sinister corners of the town are breathtakingly detailed, so much so it can feel as if he’s conjuring them back into being. His complex, sinuous sentences are filled with striking and disorienting metaphors as in “The Street of Crocodiles” which builds on Drohobycz’s dependence on the oil industry and the disruption of its historical architecture by new, makeshift areas revolving around sales of cheap goods and pornography. A change that, from Schulz’s perspective, results in spaces of spectacle without substance – in real life Drohobycz was dubbed the ‘Galician California’. Here these liminal spaces are represented as degenerate, riddled with the excesses of American consumerist values – his patent horror at this kind of development reminded me of Adorno at times. Although ironically it was his brother’s job in the oil industry that funded Schulz’s early writing. But, as is common with Schulz, these are also fertile places, organised by dreamlike logic, filled with grotesque and magical happenings.
I find some of the attitudes in Schulz’s work jarring and uncomfortable, one example is his portrayal of women, particularly obvious in “Undula” a recently rediscovered piece. But I also love his narratives, so I was a bit uncertain about reading this new set of translations by Stanley Bill – also an expert on Schulz – but I thought they worked really well to communicate Schulz’s singular style, the marvels of his imagination. I think for anyone wanting to revisit Schulz or someone looking for an introduction, this collection’s more than decent. It comes with a useful overview of Schulz’s life and work, in which Bill attempts to provide the wider context often overshadowed by accounts of Schulz's murder by a Gestapo officer during WW2.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Pushkin Press for an ARC
December 1, 2023
What a treat it was to revisit the singular vision of Bruno Schulz in this new English translation of his short fiction by Stanley Bill, published in an attractive pocket-sized edition by Pushkin Press. The book collects the most celebrated stories from Schulz's two published collections: The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In his introduction, Bill states that his aim with this new translation was 'find a middle path' between the work of the two previous translators of Schulz's stories into English: Celina Wieniewska and Madeline G. Levine. While Wieniewska has received much deserved credit for being the first to introduce Schulz to English readers, her translations have at times been criticized for oversimplifying Schulz's language in an effort to make his writing more accessible. Levine, on the other hand, intended for her 2018 translation of Schulz's collected fiction to present his writing in a manner as close to the original style and syntax as possible. While I've not read Levine's efforts, I can say that I think Bill has improved upon Wieniewska's translations, at least based on the occasional comparisons I made between individual stories. Certainly this is a welcome new addition to the existing translations and will hopefully bring even more attention to Schulz’s work. Readers unfamiliar with Schulz should seize this opportunity to get acquainted with one of the greatest writers of strange, dreamlike fiction. So much of contemporary weird/horror literature owes a debt to this master. In particular, fans of Thomas Ligotti who haven't read Schulz are missing out on one of his major influences, particularly in terms of mood and characteristics of his settings. Once you read Schulz you'll see his dark smudged fingerprints all over Ligotti's fiction.
I plucked a branch from a roadside tree. The green of the leaves was dark, almost black. It was a strangely vivid blackness, deep and benevolent like a dream filled with nourishment and power. All the greys of the landscape were derived from that single shade. In our region, the landscape takes on that hue on a cloudy summer’s evening saturated with persistent rain. The same deep, calm abnegation, the same resigned and definitive numbness, no longer in need of the consolation of colour.
March 1, 2024
I received a review copy of this book from Pushkin Press via Edelweiss for which my thanks.
Pushkin’s Essential Stories series has given me a chance to explore many new-to-me writers of which Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobych, part of today’s Ukraine is the latest I picked up. Nocturnal Apparitions (2023) a collection of 14 short stories from his pen, written originally in Polish and translated in this version by Stanley Bill. With vivid imagery and beautiful descriptions, these stories, categorised as ‘magical realism’, are among the strangest I’ve read (yet also rather singular) conjuring up images from the purely fairy-tale-like to sometimes unsettling to others quite psychedelic or even disorienting.
The (except the last which is a previously unpublished one) stories are set around the narrator, a young boy in most of them, slightly older in others and his family—his parents who run a shop and the maid Adela, with his father suffering from illness and in various stages of mental instability at different points, sometimes taking to setting up an aviary and hatchery in the attic, at others morphing into a cockroach or crayfish (from simply taking on their behaviours to ‘becoming’ them) and on one occasion even being in a sanatorium. There are also a brother and sister, mentioned sometimes, and various shop attendants who work into their shop and lodge with them as well as lodgers they sometimes forget about and who seem to simply disappear. At times we go with the narrator to different parts of town, whether the seedy Crocodile Street or an night time excursion which unfolds dream-like, or away to the sanatorium to visit his father, at others, we are in the house and shop, as different episodes unfold either of his father unravelling in different ways, disappearing for days together within the home or of the narrator’s small adventures.
Reading these, right from when one cracks open the book’s covers, it is the imagery that strikes, clearly a reflection of his being an artist. Like in the opening piece, ‘August’ where the narrator’s father is away taking the waters somewhere while he and his mother are home in the scorching summer, as Adela returns with the shopping:
glistening cherries bursting with juice under transparent skins; dark mysterious morellos whose fragrance always surpassed their flavour; apricots whose golden pulp harboured the core of long afternoons. Alongside this pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat, with their keyboards of ribs swollen with strength and nourishment, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead molluscs and jellyfish: the raw material for a dinner whose flavour was as yet unformed and barren; the vegetative, telluric ingredients of a meal whose aroma was wild and redolent of the fields.
Or this lovely passage from what was my favourite in this collection, ‘Cinnamon Shops’:
The colourful map of the heavens expanded inro a measureless dome piled high with fantastical lands, oceans, and seas, marked with the lines of starry currents and eddies, the luminous lines of heavenly geography. The air became radiant and light to breathe, like silver gauze. Trembling anemones emerged from under white kurakuls of woolly snow, holding sparks of moonlight in their delicate cups. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated with thousands of lights and stars, which the December firmament had poured down in floods. The air breathed with a kind of secret spring, an inexpressible purity of snow and violets.
And it isn’t only the sights but the sounds and smells too, pretty much all the senses, as again one sees here from another story, ‘My Father Joins the Fire Brigade’:
As we drove the wood became darker and darker, smelling ever more aromatically of snuff, until at last it locked us in, as if inside the dry body of a cello that the wind had dully tuned.
Yet, the stories themselves are decidedly strange, bringing out perhaps the madness, depravity, the emotion that lies just beneath or perhaps even far beneath the surface of people and of places, below the acceptable facades that are kept up (or perhaps not). In the various episodes surrounding his father, the behaviours range from eccentric (even Quixotic) but possible to Kafka-like metamorphoses—sometimes people morphing into animals and animals into people, or even the author into the patient at the sanatorium or simply visiting his father. His father goes through various stages of being, disappearing little by little, rather than suddenly:
By this time, my father has definitively died. He had died multiple times, but never quite completely, always with certain reservations that necessitated a revision of fact.
But at the sanatorium, he lives multiple lives parallelly—running a substitute shop, weak and deteriorating in bed, gluttonous in a restaurant—the times of these various possibilities coexisting at this place, where much for our narrator is hazy.
The meanings of these explorations, whether it is (real) human nature or the shades and dream-like possibilities beneath the surface or whether an attempt to make what is lost stay on in a parallel space is left to the interpretation. While certainly peculiar and even bewildering, I was glad to read these, especially for their uniqueness and beautiful descriptions.
3.5
Pushkin’s Essential Stories series has given me a chance to explore many new-to-me writers of which Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobych, part of today’s Ukraine is the latest I picked up. Nocturnal Apparitions (2023) a collection of 14 short stories from his pen, written originally in Polish and translated in this version by Stanley Bill. With vivid imagery and beautiful descriptions, these stories, categorised as ‘magical realism’, are among the strangest I’ve read (yet also rather singular) conjuring up images from the purely fairy-tale-like to sometimes unsettling to others quite psychedelic or even disorienting.
The (except the last which is a previously unpublished one) stories are set around the narrator, a young boy in most of them, slightly older in others and his family—his parents who run a shop and the maid Adela, with his father suffering from illness and in various stages of mental instability at different points, sometimes taking to setting up an aviary and hatchery in the attic, at others morphing into a cockroach or crayfish (from simply taking on their behaviours to ‘becoming’ them) and on one occasion even being in a sanatorium. There are also a brother and sister, mentioned sometimes, and various shop attendants who work into their shop and lodge with them as well as lodgers they sometimes forget about and who seem to simply disappear. At times we go with the narrator to different parts of town, whether the seedy Crocodile Street or an night time excursion which unfolds dream-like, or away to the sanatorium to visit his father, at others, we are in the house and shop, as different episodes unfold either of his father unravelling in different ways, disappearing for days together within the home or of the narrator’s small adventures.
Reading these, right from when one cracks open the book’s covers, it is the imagery that strikes, clearly a reflection of his being an artist. Like in the opening piece, ‘August’ where the narrator’s father is away taking the waters somewhere while he and his mother are home in the scorching summer, as Adela returns with the shopping:
glistening cherries bursting with juice under transparent skins; dark mysterious morellos whose fragrance always surpassed their flavour; apricots whose golden pulp harboured the core of long afternoons. Alongside this pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat, with their keyboards of ribs swollen with strength and nourishment, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead molluscs and jellyfish: the raw material for a dinner whose flavour was as yet unformed and barren; the vegetative, telluric ingredients of a meal whose aroma was wild and redolent of the fields.
Or this lovely passage from what was my favourite in this collection, ‘Cinnamon Shops’:
The colourful map of the heavens expanded inro a measureless dome piled high with fantastical lands, oceans, and seas, marked with the lines of starry currents and eddies, the luminous lines of heavenly geography. The air became radiant and light to breathe, like silver gauze. Trembling anemones emerged from under white kurakuls of woolly snow, holding sparks of moonlight in their delicate cups. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated with thousands of lights and stars, which the December firmament had poured down in floods. The air breathed with a kind of secret spring, an inexpressible purity of snow and violets.
And it isn’t only the sights but the sounds and smells too, pretty much all the senses, as again one sees here from another story, ‘My Father Joins the Fire Brigade’:
As we drove the wood became darker and darker, smelling ever more aromatically of snuff, until at last it locked us in, as if inside the dry body of a cello that the wind had dully tuned.
Yet, the stories themselves are decidedly strange, bringing out perhaps the madness, depravity, the emotion that lies just beneath or perhaps even far beneath the surface of people and of places, below the acceptable facades that are kept up (or perhaps not). In the various episodes surrounding his father, the behaviours range from eccentric (even Quixotic) but possible to Kafka-like metamorphoses—sometimes people morphing into animals and animals into people, or even the author into the patient at the sanatorium or simply visiting his father. His father goes through various stages of being, disappearing little by little, rather than suddenly:
By this time, my father has definitively died. He had died multiple times, but never quite completely, always with certain reservations that necessitated a revision of fact.
But at the sanatorium, he lives multiple lives parallelly—running a substitute shop, weak and deteriorating in bed, gluttonous in a restaurant—the times of these various possibilities coexisting at this place, where much for our narrator is hazy.
The meanings of these explorations, whether it is (real) human nature or the shades and dream-like possibilities beneath the surface or whether an attempt to make what is lost stay on in a parallel space is left to the interpretation. While certainly peculiar and even bewildering, I was glad to read these, especially for their uniqueness and beautiful descriptions.
3.5
June 17, 2025
I am convinced after reading Bruno Schulz's Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories that he is one of the major writers of the 20th century. He could have written much more, except in 1942 an SS officer casually aimed his pistol at him in his native Drohobycz and shot him to death.
His short stories show Schulz to have been a creator of shimmering descriptions, but very little action. In most cases, it would indicate an inferior writer; but somehow, Schulz not only managed to carry it off, but to do so brilliantly. I have read most of the stories in this collection before under the titles of his two published collections; and it has been an exhilarating experience.
If you have never read Schulz before, start with his collection. Learn about his strange father, the perverse housemaid Adela, and the weird town where they lived. I guarantee you will like it.
His short stories show Schulz to have been a creator of shimmering descriptions, but very little action. In most cases, it would indicate an inferior writer; but somehow, Schulz not only managed to carry it off, but to do so brilliantly. I have read most of the stories in this collection before under the titles of his two published collections; and it has been an exhilarating experience.
If you have never read Schulz before, start with his collection. Learn about his strange father, the perverse housemaid Adela, and the weird town where they lived. I guarantee you will like it.
March 25, 2023
Beautifully written short stories with vivid descriptions blending dark realism with fantastic transformations, so magical realism I guess. The stories are centred around one family, a son is the narrator. Many are concerned with his fathers mental deterioration. I found it better to read each story separately as one after the other it became quite overwhelming.
Read
September 7, 2024Oh Bruno, you were one of my first loves, ever since I first discovered you almost by accident as a moody teen… it was good to see him again in a new translation. Is this a necessary volume though? No, not really – even with that additional story (surrealist masochistic fantasy published in a fucking oil industry newsletter, if that isn’t WTF, I don’t know what is). Stick with the standard volumes of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and Street of Crocodiles, and you’ll be fine.
March 28, 2023
3.5 🌟
Sanatorium in the Hourglass is brilliant story that I liked, definitely 4 stars or more. Though others are less so. The absurdity is Kafkaesque, the writing and atmosphere is similar to Poe, there is a misty dream like vibe to each of the short story, unfortunately I cannot visualise it clearly for myself, as much as the psychedelic maybe amazing as a style, not all the stories are for me.
Sanatorium in the Hourglass is brilliant story that I liked, definitely 4 stars or more. Though others are less so. The absurdity is Kafkaesque, the writing and atmosphere is similar to Poe, there is a misty dream like vibe to each of the short story, unfortunately I cannot visualise it clearly for myself, as much as the psychedelic maybe amazing as a style, not all the stories are for me.
October 14, 2025
Surreal shorts. A child & young adult’s viewpoint. Magical & dream logics. Weird atmospheres & transformations.
March 19, 2023
What a peculiar book.
This is very much a "it's not you it's me" situation as I couldn't get into most of the story. There were sections I quite enjoyed, which is why I bumped up the rating to 3 stars, but mostly it just wasn't for me. At least not at this time in my life.
Thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for the eARC.
This is very much a "it's not you it's me" situation as I couldn't get into most of the story. There were sections I quite enjoyed, which is why I bumped up the rating to 3 stars, but mostly it just wasn't for me. At least not at this time in my life.
Thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for the eARC.
December 10, 2023
The Book ... Somewhere in earliest childhood, at the first dawn of life, the horizon glowed with its gentle light. It lay in all its glory on Father's desk, while my father, silently immersed in it, patiently rubbed the spine of those decals with a moistened finger until the blank paper began to fog up and become cloudy with blissful anticipation, suddenly shedding scraps of blotting paper to reveal a peacock's eye margin framed with lashes, as my own eyes dropped, half-closing, to a virgin dawn of divine colours, to the wondrous wetness of the purest azures.
[122]
How indifferent I became to all other books!
For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has its moment, an instant in which it ascends with a scream like a phoenix, all its pages burning. In that one moment, for that one instant, we love them, though even then they are already but ashes. With bitter resignation, we sometimes wander in the late hours through those cool pages, shifting their dead phrases, like rosary beads, with a wooden rattle.
[136]
January 18, 2024
I've read the previous translations of Schulz's stories and I found this the most effective, though with no knowledge of Polish, that's purely a reader's response.
The sequencing of the stories in this "greatest hits" collection creates the feel of a continuing narrative that isn't there if you read the source volumes. But what came through most clearly for me was the almost painterly--expressionist--sense of the visual image blurring the tenuous line between "reality" and the shifting abyss just beneath.
It's standard to comment that Schulz is "Kafkaesque" but it works just as well the other way around.
The sequencing of the stories in this "greatest hits" collection creates the feel of a continuing narrative that isn't there if you read the source volumes. But what came through most clearly for me was the almost painterly--expressionist--sense of the visual image blurring the tenuous line between "reality" and the shifting abyss just beneath.
It's standard to comment that Schulz is "Kafkaesque" but it works just as well the other way around.
February 5, 2024
Bruno Schulz is a writer whose work I want to enjoy more than I actually do. He's cited by many writers that I admire, and his stories have inspired some wonderful cinematic creations from the Brothers Quay. I've tried reading Schulz's fiction in translation a couple of different times in my life, and find that his prose style just doesn't connect at all with me, and comes across as just too scattered and random. I have no idea how his words read in his native Polish, but after trying a couple of different translations of his work in English, I sadly throw in the towel.
March 6, 2023
Bruno Schulz, the legendary cult writer wrote brilliant stories that open and invade the mind to the mysteries beyond modern thinking. Rich descriptive wording that colours and shapes the remarkable stories. Highly recommended novel.
May 9, 2023
A collection of slightly unsavoury impressionist pieces. People are mad, or painfully fade away into nothing – whether just from life or addictively breeding birds – or get swamped by a kind of automatic drawing. Better perhaps is a kid on a night-time errand, whose journey turns to the fantastical, although again this is far too woolly – but then this city we're in is woolly and ill-defined, "the junk room of an enormous empty theatre" no less. Elsewhere this proves how little I like magical realism, even when practically rewriting Kafka. It seems this is just half of one book and half another, that have been translated from the Polish to English in full already before now, but for a lost piece of juvenilia added to things. The first book seems to spin off the author's real childhood, the second seems to be twisting time and sense and location like any of the South American greats – again, not really my kind of read. If it's yours, this will be fine, but for me it's just a subtitle-defying sub-two stars.
March 3, 2024
Bruno Schulz wrote these stories in Poland, currently Western Ukraine, in the 1930's, before being killed by the German army. They're marked by dark, phantasmagorical imagery and fantastical happenings. Some are more memories than they are stories, with little plot. Reminiscent of Kafka, with illogical, threatening settings and happenings, but much of the language and images are fascinating. This collection is mostly told as memories from a young boy.
"The pavements were nearly empty. The funereal, late half-light of an indeterminate time of day filtered down from a sky of undefined greyness. I could easily make out all the posters and signs, and yet I wouldn't have been surprised if I had been told it was the dead of night, Only a few shops were open. The others had their shutters half lowered, as if they had closed in a hurry. The thick, luxuriant air, intoxicant and rich, swallowed up the view here and there, wiping away a few houses, a lamp post, and part of a sign, like a wet sponge. "
"The pavements were nearly empty. The funereal, late half-light of an indeterminate time of day filtered down from a sky of undefined greyness. I could easily make out all the posters and signs, and yet I wouldn't have been surprised if I had been told it was the dead of night, Only a few shops were open. The others had their shutters half lowered, as if they had closed in a hurry. The thick, luxuriant air, intoxicant and rich, swallowed up the view here and there, wiping away a few houses, a lamp post, and part of a sign, like a wet sponge. "
May 27, 2025
Exquisite prose, like a long spiraling gyre of a poem writing itself over and over, good like Rimbeau laid over a sitcom transcribed as a recurring dream book with some of the most powerful metaphors, colors and visions, smells and an earth and world of Astro-Hungary that’s gone.
March 15, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyable, each story was unique and thought-provoking. Beautiful imagery and descriptive detail help bring these stories to vivid life. A great read
April 17, 2023
Good imagery and an interesting set of stories. It was OK for me. Maybe I'm not the right audience for it.
Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!
Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!
July 15, 2023
Strange, interesting and lushly descriptive
October 14, 2023
A collection of brilliant, surrealistic, dark, super dreamy short stories. Bearing in mind the background of the writer, these stories are incredible.
January 23, 2024
surrealist and fantastical examination of the age old issues created by strange fathers
May 13, 2024
European version of Borges without the magical touch
did-not-finish
November 12, 2024Got busy with other books but will finish the collection later.
Currently reading
February 12, 2025Only Bruno Schulz can make the everyday utterly fantastic. Can't wait to finish the rest of this collection.
May 27, 2025
i know i don’t understand polish but i get the feeling that this is not the best translation
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