Available for the first time in English, Hlasko's explosive memoir will marvel Western readers; it is a portrait of a literary renegade who ran afoul of the Polish authorities in 1958 when he traveled to Paris and published an anticommunist novel in the emigre journal "Kultura." Stripped of his Polish citizenship, he became an itinerant traveler from that point on, living the life of a vagabond in various places including Israel, the United States, and Germany, where he was mysteriously found dead in 1969 at the age of 35.
Told in a voice suffused with grit and black humor, Hlasko's...

Twentieth-century Polish literature is often said to be a witness to history, a narrative of the historical and political disasters that visited the nation. In this insightful book, Jaroslaw Anders examines Poland's modern poetry and fiction and explains that the best Polish writing of the period 1918-1989 was much more than testimony. Rather, it constantly transformed historical experience into metaphysical reflection, a philosophical or religious exploration of human existence. Anders analyzes and contextualizes the work of nine modern Polish writers. These include the three madmen of the...