WAITING FOR THE DOG TO SLEEP

Fiction. Translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski. Born in 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski is primarily known for his work on Bruno Schulz (Regions of the Great Heresy) and his poetry. Not having belonged to any literary school or circle, he occupies a peculiar place in Polish literature, and in these short stories and sketches he takes Schulz1s mythologization of reality, whereby fiction is a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal, and reinterprets it to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, Ficowski hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales--a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.