Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces

"She's accessible and deeply human and a joy—though it is a dark kind of joy—to read... She is a poet to live with." – Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World

Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading."

As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.

“Wislawa Szymborska is a philosophically inflected poet who investigates large, unanswerable questions with terrific élan and delicacy.” - Washington Post

She teaches us how the world defies and evades the names we give it. And that, too, is something of a miracle. - Edward Hirsch, The New York Times

"Szymborska is unquestionably one of the great living European poets. She's accessible and deeply human and a joy--though it is a dark kind of joy--to read. . . . She is a poet to live with. - Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World

Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable. - Charles Simic