The novel in Europe in the early 20th century took a decidedly inward turn, and Choucas (1927) is an intriguing example of the modernist psychological tradition. Its author, Zofia Nalkowska (18841954), was a celebrated Polish novelist and playwright. She rose to prominence in interwar Poland and was one of a group of early feminist writers that included Pola Gojawiczynska, Maria Dabrowska, and Maria Kuncewiczowa.
Choucas is set in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s in a sanatoria village near Lake Geneva. The book has an international focus, and the narrator, a polish woman, profiles a...

"T""he Romance of Teresa Hennert "is a masterpiece of psychological realism and a still-shocking portrait of mixed motives and bad behavior. It renders a tragicomic vision of what happens when a society is suddenly deprived of the struggle that had defined it for more than a century. Written in 1922, just four years after Poland achieved independence from its neighboring empires, the novel focuses on a Warsaw community of officers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, wives, and lovers, all of them adrift in a hell of their own makingthe long-sought freedom to shape their own destiny. At the center of...

Available for the first time in English, Zofia Nalkowska's Boundary was originally published as Granica in Poland in 1935. The modernist novel was widely discussed upon its publication and praised for its psychological realism and stylistic and compositional artistry. Over the years, it has been translated into several languages and made into a feature film, and remains a standard text in the Polish secondary school curriculum.

Nalkowska was a pioneer of feminist fiction in Central Europe. Her observation of inequality in the treatment of men and women is at the heart of...