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A “creatively captivating and intellectually challenging” existential mystery from the great Polish author—“sly, funny, and . . . lovingly translated” (The New York Times). Winner of the 1967 International Prize for Literature Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz “one of the great novelists of our century.” Now his most famous novel, Cosmos, is available in a critically acclaimed translation by the award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt. Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. In need of a quiet place to study, Witold and his melancholy friend Fuks head to a boarding house in t...
In this bitterly funny novel by the renowned Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to childishness. Originally published in Poland in 1937, Ferdydurke became an instant literary sensation and catapulted the young author to fame. Deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist regime in turn, the novel (as well as all of Gombrowicz's other works) was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature. Ferdydurke is translated here directly from the Polish for the first time. Danuta Borchardt deftly captures Gombrowicz's playful and idiosyncratic style, and she allows English speakers to experience fully the masterpiece of a writer whom Milan Kundera describes as “one of the great novelists of our century.”
Non c'è autore più insofferente alle convenzioni di Witold Gombrowicz. I suoi racconti, qui raccolti integralmente per la prima volta in Italia, sono una sintesi perfetta della sua satira conturbante, della sua visione grottesca del mondo, delle sue narrazioni paradossali e stridenti, della sua capacità di dare vita a figure irregolari e assurde, in grado di frantumare in pochi istanti le regole su cui poggia la società. Attraverso un linguaggio levigato, in cui rimbalzano giochi di parole e neologismi, Gombrowicz fa sfilare in queste pagine come in una folle parata un antisemita che si scopre figlio di un'ebrea convertita, un marito che disprezza l'avvenente moglie per perdersi dietro a...
William Whiteford offers an engaging story of Gombrowicz's life on two continents - in Poland, Argentina, and France - and an insightful analysis of his literary works. The author investigates interesting overlaps between Gombrowicz's life experiments and his ongoing struggles with literary forms.
George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange. Drawing on archival sources, much of it neglected by Sand's previous biographers, Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand's writing and defined her life. Why was Sand's relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women's liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand's identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand's mother and grandmother, and Sand's own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.
"Smuggling the most up-to-the-minute contraband in antiquated charabancs-that's what I like doing," Gombrowicz said of his work and in this later day Gothic novel he uses all the traditional paraphernalia of haunted castles, mad prince, and riddle from the past to tell the very modern story of two young people caught up in a drama of shifting identities.
A landmark autobiography written by a Polish expatriate living in Argentina is presented in a single-volume edition, now with previously unpublished pages restored. Original.
Examines Gombrowicz’s modernist aesthetics in the context of his critique of nationalism, his exploration of queer eroticism, and his interest in hybrid and subaltern identities.
Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was born and lived in Poland for the first half of his life but spent twenty-four years as an émigré in Argentina before returning to Europe to live in West Berlin and finally Vence, France. His works have always been of interest to those studying Polish or Argentinean or Latin American literature, but in recent years the trend toward a transnational perspective in scholarship has brought his work to increasing prominence. Indeed, the complicated web of transnational contact zones where Polish, Argentinean, French and German cultures intersect to influence his work is now seen as the appropriate lens through which his creativity ought to be examined. This volu...
Although Witold Gombrowicz’s unique, idiosyncratic writings include a three-volume Diary, this voluminous document offers few facts about his early life in Poland before his books were banned there and he went into voluntary exile. Polish Memories—a series of autobiographical sketches Gombrowicz composed for Radio Free Europe during his years in Argentina in the late 1950s—fills the gap in our knowledge. Written in a straightforward way without his famous linguistic inventions, the book presents an engaging account of Gombrowicz’s childhood, youth, literary beginnings, and fellow writers in interwar Poland and reveals how these experiences and individuals shaped his seemingly outlandish concepts about the self, culture, art, and society. In addition, the book helps readers understand the numerous autobiographical allusions in his fiction and brings a new level of understanding and appreciation to his life and work.