White Week and Other Stories

Award-winning Polish author Wojciech Chmielewski is a master of the short prose form. Here, in White Week, he arrives in the English language for the first time. His painterly descriptions of Poland have been compared to masters of realism such as Singer, Nowakowski, Márai, and Jünger. His stories are immersed in place, especially Warsaw, where so many of his characters' lives unfold, even as they are visited by ghosts of the country's tragic and painful past. Chmielewski weaves the mundane experiences of the moment-a lonely drunkard flirting with the waitresses at a café, crumbling buildings across from glass and steel office towers, a young father's memories of madness-with the paradoxes of the homeland: The Warsaw Uprising, the German Occupation, the Holocaust, a young girl's first communion. No strangers to long defeat, his melancholic people intersect with the inexplicably mysterious, sometimes in sorrow, sometimes in hope. "Every generation should drink less vodka than the older one.""Wojciech Chmielewski is one of the most significant prose writers in Poland today. Still, he is a unique and independent writer. In line with the tradition of realism, his writing does justice to the visible world, but his interests also lie in contemporary spirituality. He is a bard of the city, where traces of the tragic past lay hidden underneath a layer of self-satisfied modernity. His descriptions of ordinary, forgotten, and marginalized people are brilliant-and he tends to look at them with curiosity and compassion. Finally, he is a true master of short prose. No one in Poland can write such excellent short stories, novellas, or sketches as Chmielewski." --Professor Maciej Urbanowski, Jagiellonian University, CracowTranslated from Polish by Katarzyna BylówRevised by Mary R. Finnegan