The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz

First edition thus. 4to. Pp. x, 582. Black cloth, lettered in silver to spine; pictorial endpapers. Frontis., b/w pen-and-ink drawings & colour plates. Foreword by David Grossman. Edited by Jerzy Ficowski, who spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz.

A one-volume collection of the author's stories, letters, articles and drawings. Considered one of the finest Polish prose stylists of the 20th century, Schulz's brief career ended tragically during World War II, when he was gunned down by a German officer in the ghetto of Drohobycz. During his lifetime only two collections of short stories were published, The Street of Crocodiles (Sklepy cynamonowe, 1934), and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1937). A longer, lost work, The Messiah, is rumoured to be still stored in the KGB archives. In 1938 Schulz was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature.