Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

Description

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 stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.

Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist, regarded as one of the greatest Polish-language writers of all time. He was born and lived most of his life in the town of Drohobych, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. He published two collections of short stories - Cinnamon Shops and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass - during his lifetime. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Gestapo officer in 1942, whilst walking home with a loaf of bread. Much of his writing, including his final, unfinished novel The Messiah, was lost in the Holocaust.

'One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words' - John Updike 'One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe' - Cynthia Ozick 'Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality' - Chris Power 'I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life' - David Grossman 'Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness and at the same time his writing is very complex. [Reading him for the first time] was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him... a great writer' - Alejandro Zambra