author
Bruno Schulz
1892–1942
A master of dreamlike, uncanny prose, this Polish-Jewish writer turned the streets and memories of his hometown into some of the most distinctive fiction of the 20th century. He was also a visual artist and teacher, and his small body of work has had an outsized literary afterlife.
1 Audiobook
Sklepy cynamonowe
by Bruno Schulz
About the author
Born in Drohobycz in 1892, he spent most of his life in the town that would become the imaginative heart of his fiction. Writing in Polish, he was also a literary critic, visual artist, and art teacher, and is widely regarded as one of the great stylists of 20th-century Polish prose.
His best-known books are The Street of Crocodiles (also published as The Cinnamon Shops) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In these stories, ordinary family life and provincial streets open into strange, comic, and dreamlike worlds, shaped by memory, myth, and a childlike sense of wonder.
In 1938 he received the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. His life was cut short during the Holocaust when he was killed in Drohobycz in 1942, and some of his writings were lost; yet the work that survives remains singular, haunting, and deeply influential.