The previously untold story of the plot to kick Michel Foucault out of Poland in the 1950sIn 1958, Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis?a work that eventually came to be published as The History of Madness. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain ?Jurek,? who eventually led the secret police directly to Foucault?s hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland. That boy?s motivations and...
"If laughter actually is the best medicine, fortunate readers of this wonderful novel will surely enjoy perfect health for the rest of their days."--Kirkus ReviewsA comic gem, Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist "thaw." The narrator, Jerzyk ("little Jerzy"), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father's closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran...
Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character's lyrical ode to the fate of his father's perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher's desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching sto...
