Stone Upon Stone

Description

About the Author

Wieslaw Mysliwski (b.1932) won the Nike Award (the Polish equivalent of the Booker Prize) TWICE (!) for Widnokrag [Horizon] (1996) and Traktat o luskaniu fasoli [The Treatise for Shelling Beans] (2006)--forthcoming from Archipelago. In his novels and plays Mysliwski concentrates on life in the Polish countryside. His voice is utterly unique, at once colloquial and thoughtful, questioning and wise.

Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling's The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski's The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation award for Tadeusz Rózewicz's new poems, to be presented yearly to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year.

Praise for Stone Upon Stone…

"Wieslaw Mysliwski is the opposite of a star—he does not appear on television and does not entertain crowds. He simply thinks and writes beautiful novels."—Newsweek

"Exhilarating…In long, streaming paragraphs, Szymek recounts a life that is full of sorrow and happiness. He talks about everything a life can contain: lovers, drinking, war, death, accidents, experience…A dizzying array of memories and stories."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Like a more agrarian Beckett, a less gothic Faulkner, a slightly warmer Laxness, Mysliwski masterfully renders in Johnston's gorgeous translation (Mysliwski's first into English) life in a Polish farming village before and after WWII."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Stone upon Stone is the first masterpiece in Slavic literature, perhaps even in European literature, in which the fate of the peasant attains the standing of human fate in all its tragic vastness."—Anna Tatarkiewicz

"A hymn in praise of life."—Krysytna Dabrowska