Penguin.com (usa)

Last month we published a new translation of Kafka, and this month we publish a writer who did Kafka one better: "Kafka wrote a story in which a man turned into an insect, while Bruno Schulz wrote stories in which a man turned not only into one insect after another but into a crustacean too" (J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books).

Unsung in his lifetime outside of his native Poland, Schulz is now regarded as the one of the most gifted and influential writers of the twentieth century, and for the first time, with The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, American readers have access to all of Schulz's extant fiction (a novel thought to be called The Messiah, among other writings, has never been found). Here in one volume is The Street of Crocodiles together with Schulz's collection Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass plus three previously uncollected stories and thirty of Schulz's luminous and haunting drawings. The Los Angeles Times has already called our edition "magical and unforgettable."

The likes of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Cynthia Ozick have been Bruno Schulz evangelists for years, and with this new Penguin Classics edition, Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, comes out as a fan, too, contributing a dazzling foreword that will send you racing to read the stories and counting yourself among the newest devotees of Schulz's distinctive surrealist vision.