Poland

The Folding Star and Other Poems

Nominated for the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, & the Gdynia Award.

In his triumphant collection, The Folding Star and Other Poems, poet of the imagination Jacek Gutorow offers thirty-one gems that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry.

“His poems are meditative and beautiful, his diction fragile and clear...In short, it is a lovely book.” —Hey Small Press

“The ability of poetry to deal with nearly any topic and to tell little stories encapsulated in a few lines has long been a tradition of the Poles and an area they’ve displayed exceptional expertise. Gutorow has placed himself strongly within this tradition but in the most contemporary sense.” ―Gently Read Literature

From this collection:

I fell in love with language again this evening.
The excess of reality had left me stranded.
The stairs with littered with phrases and headwind.
The clock struck reticent midnight.
I roamed from the forest of nouns to the valley of adverbs
and even farther, to the vast plateau of pronouns.
There, in a building of gold-yellow walls (matte latex),
mallows and loudly climbing roses were in charge.
Tracks like phrases that turn back upon themselves.
A beach was put together with a few words that hurt the eyes
with dirty foam. In the western sky a streak left behind by a rickety jet
and its commas beginning to fray.
But that was earlier,
before I again fell in love with language
that stood there mute in the wind.

Map

“Both plain-spoken and luminous…Szymborska’s skepticism, her merry, mischievous irreverence and her thirst for the surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind—free, restless, questioning.” - NY Times Book Review

One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death. Of the approximately 250 poems included, nearly 40 are newly translated; 13 represent the entirety of the poet’s last collection never before published in English.

“Nobel laureate Szymborska’s gorgeous posthumous collection interweaves insights into the suffering experienced during WWII and the Cold War brutalities of Stalin with catchy, realistic, colloquial musings. Her poems are revelatory yet rooted in the everyday. She writes about living with horrors, and about ordinary lives: people in love, at work, enjoying a meal. This is a brilliant and important collection.” - Booklist

"Szymborska has her impressive poetic repertoire on full display in this volume [which] reveals her development over seven decades, including a gradual departure from end rhyme and the sharpening of her wit. As multitudinous as Whitman, she conveyed deep feeling through vivid, surreal imagery and is able to revive clichéd language by reconnecting it in startling ways. Odes, critiques, and persona poems are just a few of the forms her writing took. Yet, despite their diversity, the constants of her poems were nuance and observational humor. Also apparent is Szymborska’s rare ability to present an epiphany in a single line.” - Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review

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All But My Life

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops in Czechoslovakia in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey.

Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

“An unforgettable reading experience . . . All But My Life is one of the most beautifully written human documents I have ever read. In this respect it is as sensitive and 'disturbing' a story as is The Diary of Anne Frank.” —Library Journal

“Gerda moves you, and not just because the story she can tell is so horrific. It is the passion with which she looked through the horror and found a heart-felt and basic goodness in humanity . . . All But My Life is filled with wonderful acts of decency and normalcy, even as she describes three years in labor camps and three months of a forced winter march from Germany to Czechoslovakia.” —The Boston Globe

”Soul-searching and human . . . A moving personal testament to courage.” —NY Times

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The Star Diaries

"'Something peculiar is happening to my head. I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton. Unless that’s a lake in Albania.'

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride. Line drawings by the author. Translated by Michael Kandel."

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Snow White and Russian Red

"'Nails' Robakoski is unraveling after his girlfriend Magda dumps him. A tracksuited slacker who spends most of his time doing little more than searching for his next line of speed and dreaming up conspiracy theories about the Polish economy, Nails ricochets from Magda, a doomed beauty who bewitches men, to Angela, a proselytizing vegetarian Goth, to Natasha, a hellcat who tears his house apart looking for speed, to Ala, the nerdy economics-student girlfriend of the friend who stole Magda. Through it all, a xenophobic campaign against the proliferating Russian black market escalates, to the point where the citizens have to paint their houses in national colors and one of these girls will be crowned Miss No Russkies Day—or is that just in Nails’ fevered mind?"

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Modernity on Endless Trial

"Leszek Kolakowski delves into some of the most intellectually vigorous questions of our time in this remarkable collection of essays garnished with his characteristic wit. Ten of the essays have never appeared before in English.

'Exemplary. . . . It should be celebrated.' —Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review

A Notable Books of the Year 1991 selection, New York Times Book Review—a Noted with Pleasure selection, New York Times Book Review—a Summer Reading 1991 selection, New York Times Book Review—a Books of the Year selection, The Times."

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Cosmos

"Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz 'one of the great novelists of our century.' His most famous novel, Cosmos, the recipient of the 1967 International Prize for literature, is now available in a critically acclaimed translation, for the first time directly from the Polish, by an award-winning translator.

Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. On his way to a relaxing vacation he meets the despondent Fuks. As they set off together for a family-run pension in the Carpathian Mountains they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the beginning of a string of bizarre events. As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family running the pension Grombrowicz’s creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe."

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The Last Wish

Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—holds the line against the monsters plaguing humanity in this collection of adventures, the first chapter in the NY Times bestselling series that inspired the hit Netflix show and the blockbuster video games.

Geralt is a Witcher, a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary killer. His sole purpose: to destroy the monsters that plague the world.

But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good…and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

“Like a complicated magic spell, a Sapkowski novel is a hodgepodge of fantasy, intellectual discourse, and dry humor. Recommended.” —Time  

The universe of The Witcher is one of the most detailed and best-explored in modern fantasy, offering endless opportunities for fresh ideas. Complex character relationships enrich this already complex world; this is the sort of series fantasy fans will cherish.” —B&N

“Delightful, intense, irreverent, and compelling....you have to read The Witcher books because they are rife with all of the elements that make you love fiction, and especially fantasy, in the first place....In a word, The Witcher delivers.” ―Hypable

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