The Polish Short Story In English

This question repeatedly appears in each learner's mind. If you want to master a new language, you need to operate within its key components-reading, listening, vocabulary, grammar, writing, and speaking.

Immerse yourself in a world of enchanting stories with "A Collection of Tales: English and Polish Short Stories Combined." This captivating book features 75 magical short stories, rich with deeper meanings, masterfully presented in both English and Polish. It celebrates the timeless power of storytelling and the beauty of human experiences across cultures. Each story can be found side by side, with the English version on the left pages and the Polish translation on the right, allowing readers to delve into the tales while also uncovering the charm of the Polish language. Most of the stories in this collection are fairy tales filled with hidden wisdom, alongside a variety of touching dramas, thrilling mysteries, and playful narratives to satisfy every reader's taste. Embark on a journey through the magic of storytelling in this unique bilingual book. Whether you're a fan of fairy tales, a curious reader looking to explore new languages, or a Polish learner aiming to enhance your skills, "A Collection of Tales" is sure to entertain, inspire, and ignite your imagination.

The English-language debut of a major Latin American writer.

Named A Best Book of 2020 by NPR! “Imagine Call Me By Your Name set in Communist Poland and you'll get a sense of Jedrowski's moving debut about a consuming love affair amidst a country being torn apart.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “Captivating both for its shimmering surfaces and its terrifying depths. Tomasz Jedrowski is a remarkable writer.” — Justin Torres, bestselling author of We the Animals Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of Communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of André Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst. When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful, natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive Communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable. Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly coveted government position. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse. Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, postwar politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski’s indelible and thought-provoking literary debut explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines. Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter, and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present--Provided by the publisher.

Mr. Schenker now supplements his Beginning Polish with a selection of fifteen unabridged, annotated short stories, each by a different author, to be used in beginning and intermediate college courses in Polish. All of the stories, which were written within the last twenty-five years, are set in contemporary Poland, and are by authors generally considered to be among the most significant and interesting in post-World War II Poland. Each selection is preceded by an English-language biography and literary appreciation of the author. Problems that might be encountered by the reader – whether of a linguistic or cultural nature – are explained in footnotes, and a glossary at the end of the book contains all of the words occurring in the stories. There is no other reader dealing exclusively with twentieth-century Polish prose. Mr. Schenker is chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University.

Witty, surprising and sparkling, this anthology is an essential exploration of Polish literature. Its thirty-nine superb stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonization by the neighbouring empires) to the present. The stories include 'Miss Winczewska', by the classic twentieth-century writer Maria Dabrowska (1889-1965), based on her experience of returning from the provinces to the destroyed capital when the war ended in 1945; and 'In the Shadow of Brooklyn' by Stanislaw Dygat (1914-78), the comical tale of a young man's envy of what he imagines to be his father's success with women. At the contemporary end, it includes a story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (1962), 'The Green Children', a historical story set in 1656, narrated by a Scottish doctor who, as the Polish king's physician, travels about the wilds of Poland and encounters two feral children. Curated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, this anthology is a refreshing and glorious new collection of the best in Polish literature.