Gorgeous writing (and it’s translated to English!). Clever little stories sprinkled with cultural references that I enjoyed. Some of the tales are wrapped up too quickly- the twist or ending begins and ends in one or two sentences. Still, fantastic prose from a virtually unknown to the Western world writer. 3 s Jesse446 7

I thought when I bought this collection that it was contemporary, mostly because I didn't read Valancourt's description very carefully, but in fact these stories were written in the 1910s and 20s, and they feel very much of that period, but more in the line of, say, Kafka and Bruno Schulz than Lovecraft and his cohorts, even though Grabinski and HPL are almost exact contemporaries--there's a lot of metaphysical wrestling with modernity, with trains and cities, as well as what feel feudal leftovers, with a good number of nobles of various stripes, a few manor houses, and some huts in fields, and at least one gypsy's curse. So, a mirror, given what I imagine of Poland at the time, poised on the brink of cosmopolitanism in the cities but still rife with rural backwaters and peasant intellectual worlds unchanged for several hundred years. A lot of the stories feel incipiently Freudian, concerned in some way with the ranges and impacts of desire and often featuring a budding teenage girl in whose wake destruction follows. (And also, to be fair, several middle-aged bourgeois coping not very well with the same afflictions.) The Marshall Berman "all that is solid melts into air" point about the subjective experience of modernity holds as well, with multiple characters on the edge of dissolution, sometimes psychologically and sometimes literally and sometimes both. These read less "horror" as a genre and more the classic Blackwood/Dunsany weird tale--but with a modern psychological edge that dances on the line between natural and un-. Rafal Gluchowski2

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