Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2011Sandomierz is a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Early one morning in spring, a woman's naked body is found outside a former synagogue. Someone has slashed her throat open--and it looks as if it was done with the enormous razor found lying nearby. Quite by chance, Public Prosecutor Teodor Szacki just happens to be on the scene. How come? Six months earlier he broke up a gang of sex traffickers who had a drop-off point in this town. On a wave of short-lived fame, Szacki decided to move there permanently from Warsaw. But a few months after separating from his wife and daughter, and leaving the big city behind, he knows he has made a mistake. The cadaver outside the synagogue is a chance to put an end to his small-town ennui. Szacki conducts the investigation with the help of an aging policeman and a reluctant lady prosecutor. Gradually he discovers the subtle ins and outs of local society and history. In his efforts to solve the mystery he investigates a love triangle, an ancient Jewish ritual, and some Nazi symbols. In this latest detective novel from Zygmunt Miłoszewski, the author takes us to the Polish equivalent of Twin Peaks, where the scenery is colored by present-day emotions and desires, as well as events from the seemingly distant past.
Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2010The title Runners is taken from a nineteenth-century religious sect in Russia, extremists who believed the only way to remain free of the devil's influence (embodied by the established church and state) was to remain ceaselessly on the move. The book, made up of interwoven fragments of narrative and essay on a wide variety of distinct topics and set in a wide variety of periods and places, revolves around the ways in which all people are always attempting to escape something by never being fully at rest. Preoccupied with the workings of the human body, the mechanism of death, and how people connect with and disconnect from each other, Runners is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and elegant work. Another excerpt from Runners, also translated by Jennifer Croft, recently appeared in eXchanges.
Anna Piwkowska (b. Feb. 3, 1963) is a Polish poet, novelist, and essayist. The Dye Girl (Farbiarka) is her eighth published book of poetry, which revolves around meditations on love, death, mothers, and mythologies. Piwkowska graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Polish language and literature, and her poems have been published in numerous leading Polish literary journals. She has received numerous prizes for her poetry and prose, most recently having The Dye Girl acknowledged with the 2009 Warsaw Literary Prize. She has also published a novel, and a nonfiction book about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Though much of her poetry has been translated into German and Russian, most of it remains untranslated in English. Piwkowska currently lives in Warsaw.
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