{"product_id":"nocturnal-apparitions-isbn-9781805333319","title":"Nocturnal Apparitions","description":"\u003cb\u003eA gorgeous collection from cult classic Polish author Bruno Schulz: 15 of the most captivatingly strange and beautiful short stories ever written.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz's oeuvre.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeloved by famous authors from Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Safran Foer, Bruno Schulz remains one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. 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 parlor rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese 15 stories provide an exciting, accessible introduction to Schulz’s work, from mesmerizing classics like “August” and “The Age of Genius,” to the hidden gem “Undula,” a recently discovered story believed to be Schulz’s first-ever published work. Set in a phantasmagoric version of the Eastern European city where the author was born and died, they showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, crowded with moments of stunning beauty. What emerges is a nightmarish reality where the boundaries of time and space are compromised and made strange.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA cult classic author whose career was tragically cut short by his murder during World War II, the world of Schulz’s imagination – overpowering and utterly unique – is ripe for rediscovery.Translators’ Foreword\u003cbr\u003eAugust\u003cbr\u003eVisitation\u003cbr\u003eBirds\u003cbr\u003eCinnamon Shops\u003cbr\u003eThe Street of Crocodiles\u003cbr\u003eCockroaches\u003cbr\u003eThe Gale\u003cbr\u003eThe Night of the Great Season\u003cbr\u003eThe Book\u003cbr\u003eThe Age of Genius\u003cbr\u003eMy Father Joins the Fire Brigade\u003cbr\u003eThe Sanatorium under the Hourglass\u003cbr\u003eFather’s Last Escape\u003cbr\u003eUndula\"An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz’s oeuvre.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stanley Bill’s translations come as an invigorating reminder of the uncanny verbal sorcery behind this unique voice and vision.... The results, hauntingly phrased, can be suitably weird—but never impenetrable... Bill catches the outrageous wit of Schulz’s nightmare tableaux.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The supreme virtuoso of Polish fiction... Genius\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jewish Chronicle\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eBruno Schulz\u003c\/b\u003e was a Polish Jewish writer and artist who has influenced writers including Salman Rushdie, Roberto Bolaño, David Grossman and Cynthia Ozick. He was born and lived most of his life in the town of Drohobych, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Poland, and now part of Ukraine. He published two collections of short stories - \u003ci\u003eCinnamon Shops\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass\u003c\/i\u003e - during his lifetime. Schulz was shot and killed by a German SS officer in Drohobych in 1942. His unfinished novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Messiah\u003c\/i\u003e, was lost in the Holocaust.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eStanley Bill\u003c\/b\u003e is originally from Australia. He is Professor of Polish Studies at Cambridge University, and has translated the work of Czesław Miłosz as well as the stories of Bruno Schulz.1.\u003cbr\u003eIn July, my father went off to take the waters, leav- ing me with my mother and elder brother at the mercy of the white-hot, blinding days of summer. Dazzled by the light, we leafed through the great book of holidays, its pages glowing in the bright radiance and holding in their depths the languidly sweet pulp of golden pears.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAdela returned from the market on those luminous mornings like Pomona from the flames of the fiery day, pouring out from her basket the colourful bounty of the sun: glistening cherries bursting with juice under transparent skins; dark, mysterious morellos whose fragrance always surpassed their flavour; apri- cots whose golden pulp harboured the core of long afternoons.\u003cbr\u003eAlongside 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 ingredi- ents of a meal whose aroma was wild and redolent of the fields.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach day, the whole pageant of the summer passed through our dark, first-floor apartment on the market square: the silence of shimmering rings of air; squares of brightness dreaming their fervent dreams on the floor; the melody of a barrel organ, drawn out of the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three measures of a refrain played somewhere in the distance on a piano, over and over, swooning in the sunshine on white pavements, lost in the fire of the declining day. After her cleaning, Adela lowered the linen blinds and cast the room into shadow. The colours deepened by an octave and the room was filled with shade, as if plunged into the half-light of a deep-sea trench, still more dimly reflected in the green mirrors, while the heat of the day breathed against the blinds, which rippled gently with noontime dreams.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn Saturday afternoons, I went out with my mother for a walk. From the semi-darkness of the entrance hall, we stepped out into the sunny bath of the day. Passers-by waded through gold, their eyes squinting against the glare, as if sealed shut with honey, while curled upper lips exposed teeth and gums. Everyone wading through that golden day bore the very same grimace from the scorching heat, as if the sun had stamped one and the same mask on all its worshippers—the golden mask of a solar fraternity. Old men and youngsters, women and children, all greeted one another in passing on those streets with the same mask painted on their faces in thick, gold paint, grinning at one another with that Bacchic grimace: the barbaric mask of a pagan cult.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe market square was empty and yellow with the blazing heat, swept clean of dust by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias grew out of the desola- tion of the yellow square, their bright foliage seething above it in bouquets of exquisitely traced green fili- grees, like the trees on an old Gobelins tapestry. It seemed the trees were simulating a gale, shaking their crowns theatrically so as to show off in grandiloquent excess the refinement of those leafy fans with their silver underbellies, like the pelts of elegant vixens. The old buildings, polished smooth by many days of wind, were coloured with the reflections of the vast atmos- phere, with the echoes and reminiscences of diverse hues dispersed in the depths of the colourful weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days had been chipping away at the false glaze, like patient stuc- coists scraping a mould of plaster off old façades, exposing day by day with ever greater clarity the true faces of the houses, the physiognomy of fate and life that had shaped them from within. Now the windows slept, blinded by the glare of the empty square; the balconies exposed their emptiness to the sky; the open entrance halls smelt of coolness and wine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA little gang of tramps, sheltering from the fiery broom of the heat in a corner of the square, had besieged a little stretch of wall, attacking it over and over with tosses of buttons and coins, as if the true mystery of the wall, marked with the hieroglyphs of cracks and scratches, could be read like a horoscope from those metal discs. The square was empty. One half-expected to see the Good Samaritan’s donkey being led in by the bridle under the shade of the sway- ing acacias to a vaulted entrance hall lined with wine- maker’s barrels, and that two servants would tenderly lift the sick man down from his feverish saddle and carry him carefully up the cool steps to a first floor fragrant with the Sabbath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so my mother and I strolled down the two sunny sides of the market square, dragging our broken shadows over all the buildings, as if across a keyboard. The little squares of the cobblestones passed slowly under our soft, flat steps: some of them pale pink like human skin; others gold and blue; all of them flat, warm, and velvety in the sun, like sunny faces tram- pled by many feet into anonymity, into blissful nothingness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt last, on the corner of Stryj Street, we entered the shade of the pharmacy. In its wide window, a great pitcher of raspberry juice symbolized the coolness of balms that could soothe every ailment. Only a few buildings further on, the street could no longer keep up its urban decorum—like a peasant returning to his native village, steadily stripping off the trappings of metropolitan elegance along the way to turn back into a ragged bumpkin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe little suburban houses were drowning, plunged right up to their windows in the luxuriant, tangled growth of their gardens. Forgotten by the vast day, all manner of plants, flowers, and weeds proliferated luxuriantly, glad of this respite, through which they could slumber on the margins of time, on the frontiers of the infinite day. A gigantic sunflower, hoisted up on a thick stalk and apparently afflicted with elephantia- sis, waited in yellow mourning through the last, sad days of its life, bowed beneath the excess of its monstrous corpulence. Naïve suburban bluebells and calicos stood helplessly by in their starched pink and white shirts, vulgar little flowers uncomprehending of the sunflower’s tragedy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2. \u003cbr\u003eA tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, bushes, and this- tles ran riot in the fire of the afternoon. The garden’s afternoon nap buzzed with a swarm of flies. Golden stubble roared like red locusts in the sun; crickets screamed in the heavy rain of fire; seed pods exploded quietly like grasshoppers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClose to the fence, a sheepskin of grass rose in a hunchback mound, as if the garden had turned on its side in its sleep, its broad peasant shoulders inhaling the silence of the earth. Upon those garden shoulders, the slovenly, womanish fertility of August was magni- fied in a quiet hollow of giant burdocks, which ran wild in furry sheets of leaves and exuberant tongues of fleshy green. The bulging effigies of the burdocks spread out like old crones seated on the ground, half devoured by their own frenzied skirts. Free of charge, the garden gave away its cheapest groats of elder, thick kasha of plantain reeking of soap, wild aqua vitae of mint, and all manner of the worst trash of August. But on the other side of the fence—beyond this summer nursery, where the idiocy of the crazed weeds prolifer- ated—was a rubbish heap wildly overgrown with thistles. No one knew it was there that the August of that summer performed its great pagan orgy. On the rubbish heap, leaning against the fence and overgrown with elder, was the bed of the imbecile girl, Tłuja. For that is what we all called her. The bed stood on a pile of refuse, old pots, scraps, slippers, rubble and debris, painted green and propped up on two old bricks in place of its missing legs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe air over the rubble had run wild in the heat, intersected by lightning flights of glistening horseflies driven mad by the sun, crackling as if with invisible rattles, which whipped everything into a frenzy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTłuja sits crouched in yellow bedding and rags. Her large head bristles with the rough bale of her black hair. Her face is scrunched up like the bellows of a concertina. Every so often, a grimacing sob crum- ples it up into a thousand intersecting folds, before astonishment stretches it back out again, smoothing out the folds and exposing the slits of little eyes and moist gums with yellow teeth below a snoutish, fleshy lip. Hours pass by, filled with heat and boredom, while Tłuja mutters to herself under her breath or dozes off, whimpering and grunting. Flies settle all over her motionless form in a thick swarm. Then suddenly the whole heap of dirty rags, strips, and sheets begins to move, as if animated by a scuttling nest of rats breed- ing inside it. The flies start with alarm and rise in a great whining swarm, filled with furious buzzing, flashing, and shimmering. And as the rags fall to the ground and scatter over the trash heap like frightened rats, the heart of the mass begins to unwrap itself, digging itself out, stripping away the husk to reveal the core of the pile. The half-naked, tanned idiot girl slowly drags herself up, like a pagan idol rising onto short, childlike legs; a bestial shriek erupts from a neck bloated with a rush of anger, from a reddened face darkening with rage, as arabesques of swollen veins bloom like barbaric paintings—a hoarse shriek ripped out of the bronchi and pipes of a half-animal, half- divine breast. The sunburnt thistles scream; the burdocks puff themselves up and flaunt their shame- less flesh; weeds slobber with glistening venom; and the idiot girl, hoarse with the screaming and in wild convulsions, thrusts her fleshy loins with frenzied violence against the trunk of an elder tree, which creaks quietly under the assault of her wanton lust, exhorted by that whole impoverished choir into a degenerate, pagan fertility.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTłuja’s mother hires herself out to housewives to scrub their floors. She is a small woman, yellow as saffron, leaving her saffron traces on the floors, fir tables, seats, and sleeping benches she cleans in shabby rooms. Adela once took me to the house of that old Maryśka. It was early in the morning when we entered her small room, whitewashed a shade of blue, with its beaten earth floor bathed in bright yellow sunshine amidst a morning silence punctuated only by the dreadful rattle of the peasant clock on the wall. In a chest on some straw lay the imbecile Maryśka, white as a sheet and quiet as a glove from which a hand has just slipped out. As if to take advantage of her slum- ber, the silence chattered away to itself—a yellow, garish, malicious silence conducting loud monologues and disputations with itself, vulgarly spinning out its maniacal soliloquy. Maryśka’s time, a time imprisoned in her soul, emerged from within her, terrifyingly real; it rampaged about the room in a pounding, diabolical fury, rising out of the clock-mill in the bright silence of the morning like cheap flour, loose flour, the moronic flour of the insane.","brand":"Pushkin Press Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233439396069,"sku":"NP9781805333319","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781805333319.jpg?v=1767733847","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/nocturnal-apparitions-isbn-9781805333319","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}