
SCHULZ, Bruno. Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories. London: Macgibbon & Kee. 1963.
8vo. Black cloth bound with red title lettering to spine; Pictorial dust jacket with authors portrait on the back both produced by Schulz himself; pp. [6], 159, [1]; Slight offsetting to front end paper and very minimal bruising to top of spine; Head and tail of dust jacket spine minimally rubbed; otherwise near fine.
First UK edition.
‘The life of the word resides in the fact that its tenses and strains to produce a thousand associations, like the quartered body of the snake of legend, whose separate pieces sought each other in the dark.’- Schulz, The Mythologization of Reality.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and fine artist. What survives of his output are two collections of short fiction, a series of his correspondence and journal entries all composed in Polish. These are accompanied by some of his paintings which often portray masochistic themes, (he also taught drawing classes). Regardless, Schulz is considered one of the very great Polish language writers of the 20th century and an inspiration to writers such as Phillip Roth and Cynthia Ozick.
In 1934, with the help of the writer Zofia Nałkowska, his beautiful first book Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops) was published, later translated by Celina Wieniewska together with the novella The Comet. Schulz also assisted his fiancée in a Polish translation of Kafka's The Trial in 1936. He was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award in 1938.
In often delirious and mythically poetic language, Cinnamon Shops relays the experience of existing in the cloth merchant's shop where he was raised alongside the absurd lifestyle of his father. The majority of Schulz's later works did not survive the Holocaust. This includes his final novel The Messiah. No trace of this unfinished manuscript survives posthumously, and it is considered lost. In 1942, Schulz was murdered by the Nazis.
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