The complete fiction of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer and artist of Jewish descent, produced his small but highly influential body of work in the interwar period. His two major collections of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, are characterized by a surreal, mythologized recollection of his childhood in Drohobycz. These texts are celebrated for their dense, ornate prose and their ability to elevate mundane domestic life into something deeply psychological and fantastical.

The 1989 Walker and Company edition serves as a significant English-language collection of Schulz's prose, aiming to introduce his visionary style to a broader Western readership. The design and translation choices reflect a long-standing academic and literary effort to capture the idiosyncratic rhythms of his Polish original, which had been tragically suppressed and scattered during the Holocaust. Upon its release, such collections were met with reverence by literary critics who recognized Schulz as a peer to Kafka, solidifying his status as a foundational figure in twentieth-century modernist literature.