Poland’s recent history from Solidarity to martial law, from martial law to the end of communism and today’s rough and tumble politics are all encompassed in this collection of stories by Janusz Anderman’s relentlessly honest gaze and his stark ‘tape recorder ear’ – the raw prose he pioneered amid the mainly lyric poetry of the Polish dissidents.

 “The crowd [here] has similarities to characters in the puppet theatre…the Journalist, the Pro­vocateur, the Official, the Drunkard, the Patriot Pole, the Oppositionist Pole, the Idiot Pole. They declaim convulsively on some current issue and vanish again into the crowd….This vision is suffi­ciently grotesque to be apocalyptic.”                              JERZY PILCH in The World of Janusz Anderman

“These intensely private visions carry powerful resonance.” NEW YORK TIMES

“An intense, committed writer whose sheer talent jostles energetically against his muckraker’s impulses; a blunt polemicist redeemed by his gifts for gallows humor and surrealist portraiture.”                                                 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Freeze Frame One: The country is fading

Sinking Wells

Freeze Frame Two: That December day

Night Shift in Emergency

Freeze Frame Three: These women

Turkish Baths

Freeze Frame Four: New World Street

Return Visit

Freeze Frame Five: When did it happen?

Topical Subject

Freeze Frame Six: The woman struggles

Shabby Lodgings

Freeze Frame Seven: Planes that take off

Journey

Freeze Frame Eight: The psychiatrist

No Sound of Footsteps in the Treetops

Freeze Frame Nine: Patches of steel-coloured paint

White Night

Freeze Frame Ten: This town’s Victory Square

A Day of Mist and Cloud 

Freeze Frame Eleven: The Bazaar

Bitter Red Star

Freeze Frame Twelve: The pavement in the square

Czarnoleka: Black Meadow

Freeze Frame Thirteen: This conversation is being monitored

Breathless

Freeze Frame Fourteen: The taxi driver

Prison Sickness

Freeze Frame Fifteen: The alien railway station

1985 and after....

Empty… Sort of

The National Theatre’s Burning Down

Poland Still?

VICTO ...

The Three Kings

Chain of Pure Hearts

A Sense of

World of Worlds

Stanislaw Baranczak: Anderman in Context

Jerzy Pilch: The World of Jansz Anderman

About the Author

About the translator

About Readers International