In 1940, Gustav Herling was arrested after he joined an underground Polish army that fell into Russian hands. He was sent to a northern Russian labour camp, where he spent the two most horrible years of his life. In this book, he tells of the people he was imprisoned with, the hardships they endured, and the indomitable spirit and will that allowed them to survive. Above all, he creates a portrait of how people - deprived of food, clothing, proper medical care, and forced to work at hard labour - can come together to form a community that offers hope in the face of hopelessness, that offers life when even the living have no life left.

A World Apart

Gustaw Herling

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Classics

Selected by The Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the Ten Best Fiction Books of 2003.The Noonday Cemetery &amp; Other Stories, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel The Island was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir, A World Apart, is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag. Volcano and Miracle, published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his Journal Written at Night. But nowhere before have Herling's best stories―and Herling was indeed a master of the short story―been compiled and published in English translation. In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer. These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by The Boston Globe that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."

The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Bill Johnston

Literary

New Directions

Reference

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Books by Gustaw Herling