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Linked stories, mythic prose · Medium-hard

The Street of Crocodiles

Bruno Schulz · 1934 · Poland

A dreamlike reconstruction of childhood, family, shops, streets, fathers, mannequins, matter, memory, and imagination in a provincial town transformed by language.

Notes and Misconceptions

It is not plotless. The movement is metamorphic rather than event-driven.

Schulz's father is comic, pathetic, magical, and doomed: one of modern literature's great unstable figures.

Best Path

Modernism, dream prose, strange cities

Reading Paths

  • Strange Before Modern

    Older books that already know how to be unstable, comic, speculative, and formally strange.

Tags

polishmodernismdreamlikememoryfamilyshort-storiesstrange-classicsmedium-hard