February 2015
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FictionNovember 2019Morkut
by Aleksandra Majdzinska
Like through a magnifying glass, the author observes the details of swept, overlooked, unnoticed matters that take place away from the main roads. Each story is a fate of an individual person determined by a great story or by small, everyday matters. Fourteen remarkably pictures that are worth stopping at.
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October 2018Literary Travel Guide Gdansk/Danzig
Eight City Walks
by Peter Oliver Loew
Danzig/Gdansk in Poland, with its history characterized by different cultures, is not only the setting literary place of the works of Günter Grass, but also many other German and Polish writers from baroque times to the present. With eight walks the Literary Travel Guide presents scenes from novels and poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, Johanna Schopenhauer, Alfred Döblin, Stanisława Przybyszewska, Stefan Chwin, Paweł Huelle and many others. They also lead to less visited areas of the city, which is also known as center of the Hanseatic League and Solidarność as well as a symbol of the post-war order of Versailles, the outbreak of war in 1939 and the Polish reconstruction of its old town after the Second World War.
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October 2022The Pavilion for Small Mammals
by Patryk Pufelski
“Noodle was one of the most important people in my life, despite weighing less than a kilogram and having four legs. I also think he was the only ferret in world history to visit every chapter of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.” (page 17) The Pavilion for Small Mammals is the lightly fictionalised diary of contemporary Polish writer Patryk Pufelski. As a young, Jewish, openly gay zookeeper with a charming affinity for things past, his book offers answers to questions you didn’t know you had. How do you nanny a baby flamingo? Is being a vegetarian cyclist really enough to be an enemy of the Polish state? What does a friendship between a twenty-something-year-old, self-declared wannabe pensioner and an octogenarian Holocaust survivor look like? Spanning almost a decade, Pufelski chronicles his journey from dropping out of university to landing a zookeeping job of his dreams. He shares not only laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating anecdotes from his personal and professional life, but also offers moving pictures of his family history, the present-day Jewish community in Poland, and life as a queer person under a socially conservative government. All the while, animals leap off the page, not least pet ferrets, tarantulas and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. With seemingly effortless literary wit and endearing sensitivity to those around him – “all of them animals, some of them humans” – Pufelski’s Pavilion seems to be an effortless lesson on how the diary form can combine the personal with the political into an entertaining, heart-warming whole.
