Nocturnal Apparitions
Essential Stories
Bruno Schulz and Stanley Bill, Translator
Beloved 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.
These 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.
A 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.
"An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz’s oeuvre." —The Washington Post
“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.” —The Wall Street Journal
"The supreme virtuoso of Polish fiction... Genius" —Jewish Chronicle
About the Authors
Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, artist, and teacher, born in Drohobych, a provincial town in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine. He spent nearly his entire life there, working as a drawing teacher at a local secondary school while writing in the evenings.
His reputation rests on two story collections, Cinnamon Shops (1934), published in English as The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). Drawing on the landscape of his childhood, Schulz transformed ordinary family life into a dreamlike world of myth, where time bends, fathers become birds, and a small town expands into something cosmic. His prose, dense with metaphor and sensory detail, has been compared to that of Kafka, whom he translated into Polish, and Proust, though his voice remains unmistakably his own. He was also a gifted graphic artist, and his drawings and etchings carry the same obsessive, uncanny imagination as his fiction.
Schulz was killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in the Drohobych ghetto. A manuscript he was known to be working on, a novel titled The Messiah, was lost. Today he is regarded as one of the most original prose stylists of twentieth-century European literature, and his work has influenced writers including Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Philip Roth, and Olga Tokarczuk.
Stanley Bill 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.