The latest addition to my website is Rafał Wojasiński‘s Tefil (Tefil). A young man looking for information about his long deceased mother goes to a small Polish village, where he meets Tefil, who may have known her. However this book is, as the title states, about Tefil. He is old, permanently broke but more than … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Agnieszka Taborska‘s gnieszka Taborska: Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks (The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks). Taborska tells the story of the fictitious Phoebe Hicks, who, is made ill by eating clam fritters in mid-19th century Providence, RI, and turns to spiritualism. While we see the traditional features of spiritualism … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vasyl Shevchuk‘s Побратими, або Пригоди двох запорожців на суходолі, в морі та під водою (Blood Brothers). This novel is set in the seventeenth century and tells of the Zaporozhian Cossacks attempt to free themselves from the Poles as well as from the Tatars and Turks. Our hero is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wioletta Greg‘s Guguły (Swallowing Mercury). This is a delightful and poetical tale of a girl growing up in rural Poland, a village called Hektary, during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the changes taking place in Poland at that time, these seem to have only minimal impact on Hektary. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Siegfried Lenz‘s Der Überläufer (The Turncoat). This novel was originally written in 1951, Lenz’s second novel. However, it was not published then, partially for political reasons, and forgotten, only for the manuscript to be found in his papers after his death in 2014. It was published to great … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz‘s Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy (The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma). While very well-known in Poland, if this book is known in the English-speaking world, it is because Jerzy Kosinski borrowed extensively from it for his novel Being There. It tells the story of a poor young man, down … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rafał Wojasiński‘s Olanda (Olanda). We follow the stories of a group of mainly elderly people in a fairly remote Polish village. Most of them are fairly lost souls, detached from God and religion and, indeed, often from other people, including their spouse and children, drifting along. If they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Olga Tokarczuk‘s Czysty kraj [Pure Country]. This is the first and longest story in a collection called Ostatnie historie [Recent Stories]. It tells of Ida Marzec, a fifty-four year old divorced Polish tour guide who, when driving a friend’s car during winter, skids off the road. She seems … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Stefan Chwin‘s Hanemann (Death in Danzig). Hanemann whose name is the title in most languages, including the Polish original, is a professor of anatomy in Danzig. He is to perform a post-mortem when he discovers that the body is of his lover, killed in a ferry accident. We … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Olga Tokarczuk‘s Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). When you are self-isolating from a virus, a nearly one thousand page long novel by a Nobel Prize Winner written in a foreign language is the best way to distract yourself. It is availabe in Czech, Dutch, French, German and Swedish … Read more