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 parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.

"Stanley Bill's sensitively translated new selection... offers anglophone readers a profoundly satisfying immersion in [Schulz's] lushness... Bill, an accomplished scholar of Polish literature, demonstrates an artist's sense of where to adhere to the original and where to depart... Stanley Bill's recasting of Bruno Schulz's stories is sure to plant the author more firmly in the hearts of new and returning readers, restoring him to the centre of the literary conversation." - Times Literary Supplement

"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" - Wall Street Journal

"An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz's oeuvre" - Washington Post