A history of Poland and its neighbours that covers the Silver Age, during which the Commonwealth was ruled by elective kings, a Frenchman and a Hungarian, then by the Swedish House of Vasa.

    But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial, and mourning could begin. Here we travel through the ravaged postwar landscape in the company of a few survivors (mostly women) as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where victims' clothing is displayed; an underground cave littered with pale jumbles of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; a funeral service where a family can finally say goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, a feat of powerful reportage told from the viewpoint of people who have lost nearly everything. With the sensibility of Philip Gourevitch or Ryszard Kapuscinski, Tochman captures a painful moment in history, as an entire community comes to terms with its raw and recent past.

    Startling discontinuities and surprises erupt throughout these avant-garde landscapes by Poland's outstanding modern dramatist where duchesses and policemen, gangsters and surrealist painters, psychiatrists and locomotive engineers wander in and out, kill one another, and carry on philosophical conversations at the same time.

    Communists, socialists, and nationalists; thieves and black marketeers; servants and fading aristocrats; veteran terrorists and bands of murderous children bewitched by the lure of crime and adventure--all of these converge on a provincial town's chief hotel, a microcosm of an uprooted world.

    A Pound of Steam presents seven poems exploring identity and alienation, a philosophical bent that can be found in her song lyrics, but here goes further to unearth truths about the human condition.

    While the fighting still raged, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland's leading foreign correspondent, traveled to Ethiopia to seek out and interview Selassie's servants and closest associates on how the Emperor had ruled and why he fell. This "sensitive, powerful. . .history" (The New York Review of Books) is Kapuscinski's rendition of their accounts—humorous, frightening, sad, grotesque—of a man living amidst nearly unimaginable pomp and luxury while his people teetered between hunger and starvation.

    A masterpiece of post-war Polish literature, Stone Upon Stone is Wiesław Myśliwski’s grand epic in the rural tradition—a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man’s connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive.Wise and impetuous, plainspoken and compassionate Szymek, recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerrilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother.Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek’s narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered, yet who loves life to the very core.

    A wounded soldier appears outside the house and is cared for by Salomea, the young ward of the absent owners, who has been left in the manor with an aged servant. As the two strive to conceal the soldier's presence during brutal and invasive visits by the Russians, Salomea finds herself falling in love with her patient.

    and the Florida Crackers -the zany but lovable folks who populated the remote hamlet that was Marjorie Rawlings’ home. With a gift for humor and a venerable ear for dialect comes the author’s personal accounts of the people, scenery and wildlife of Cross Creek.Short Stories:A Crop Of BeansBenny and the Bird DogsJacob’s LadderThe PardonVarmintsThe EnemyGal Young UnAlligatorsA Plumb Clare ConscienceA Mother In MannvilleCocks Must Crow

    Three marriages on which to build his empire.But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father's schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband by her side.The gods may grant her wish, but crowns sit heavy, and power is a sword that cuts both ways.

    If the diagnosis they present is right, then we have a great problem in Poland.” —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize laureate and author of FlightsMikołaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction—a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland’s top literary prize—Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth.Both biting and knowing, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence.In “Unnecessary Trouble,” a grandmother discloses on her deathbed that she is Jewish; she does not want to die without her family knowing. What is passed on to the family is fear and the struggle of what to do with this information. In “Cacophony,” Jewish identity is explored through names, as Miron and his son Jurek demonstrate how heritage is both accepted and denied. In “My Five Jews,” a non-Jewish narrator remembers five interactions with her Jewish countrymen, and her own anti-Semitism, ruefully noting that perhaps she was wrong and should apologize, but no one is left to say “I’m sorry” to.Each of the thirty-one stories is a dazzling and haunting mini-monologue that highlights a different facet of modern Poland’s complex and difficult relationship with its Jewish past.

    These experiences, as well as the sudden death of her husband, led her to engagement with the Bible and the great religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Her poems record the struggles of a rational mind with religious faith, addressing loneliness and uncertainty in a remarkably direct, unsentimental manner. Her spiritual quest has resulted in extraordinary poems on Job, other biblical personalities, and victims of the Holocaust. Other poems explore the meaning of loss, grief, and human life. Still, her poetry expresses a fundamentally religious sense of gratitude for her own existence and that of other human beings, as well as for myriad creatures, such as hedgehogs, birds and "young leaves willing to open up to the sun."

    The topics may vary widely, from love to mental illness to the most recent "Florida Man" headline, but it's all in the same handwriting. Welcome to The Immortal Soul Salvage Yard.

    It is an epic journey not only affirming that “there is a difference between sadness and suffering;” but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. The Book of Joshua calls out in hunger and loneliness, “I didn’t feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.”

    More witty and stylish poetic therapy for the Venus and Mars generation.