‘Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, or the Second Book of Genesis’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

Why has modern Polish literature made such a speciality of liminal forms in which humans and machines, consciousness and object, uneasily meet? Jewish mysticism and its secular branches surely supply part of the answer. The alchemical and Kabbalistic life of things pervades the stories of small-town surrealism in Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, dominated as they are by the mysterious father-figure who acts like a heretically creative demiurge. Here, inanimate objects strut and glow with an existential confidence denied to cowed humanity. The father’s “treatise” on mannequins tells us that “lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life”.

First published 1934; collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘Place’ by Andrzej Stasiuk, translated by Margarita Nafpaktitis

The post-Communist Galicia where Stasiuk’s sequence of braided stories unfolds is another liminal location. Here, boundaries fray, matter dissolves and epochs shift. A new age of “market forces” runs messily into the mud of tradition, habit and sheer weirdness in this liquid backwater. Amid this existential fog, the ideological fantasies of today – like those of yesterday – will soon rust and crumble. In ‘Place’, the attempt to transplant a church from its original site to a museum prompts the understanding that “a place cannot be carried off”. Not surprisingly, it’s a stubbornly rooted ghost (of a wife-murderer) who anchors these hauntingly stick-in-the-mud tales.

First published 1995; collected in Tales of Galicia, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2003

‘The Birch Grove’ by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Consumptive Staś returns to die on the remote woodland estate of his widowed brother Bolesław. In this rain-soaked hideaway, elements and states mingle: love and hate; air, earth and water; life and death. This is a long, seemingly naturalistic story, with all the textured heft and grip of a compact novel. But it enters a sort of fairy-tale forest in which nothing about our senses, or our selves, stays solid. These “modern” Poles with their “European” affinities may scoff at peasant superstitions. No matter: the “warm incessant rain” will erase distinctions and identities, so that the brothers merge into a “deep, dark and impenetrable” world beyond their rational understanding.

Written 1932; collected in Found in Translation, edited by Frank Wynne, Head of Zeus, 2018

‘The Elephant’ by Sławomir Mrożek, translated by Konrad Syrop

Mrożek’s compact fables turn the bureaucratic illogic and rigidity of life in the Stalinist Poland of the 1950s into deadpan satirical vignettes. The pieces find “absurdity” not in some abstruse realm of avant-garde ideas, but in the frustrations and deceptions of everyday life. In the title-story to this collection, the “elephant” allocated to a cash-starved zoo turns out to be ersatz: a rubber surrogate that modestly refuses to waste the precious hard currency that a real beast would cost. But even simulacra (that inescapable Polish motif again) may acquire a transformative life of their own…

First published 1957; collected in The Elephant, Penguin Central Europe Classics, 2010

‘The Little Paint Girl’ by Wioletta Greg, translated by Eliza Marciniak

Polish authors cross physical borders as their work does genres. The full surname of Wioletta “Greg” is Grzegorzewska and she lives in Essex – a county, at least in its rural reaches, maybe not so distant in spirit from the countryside in which the young narrator of Swallowing Mercurygrows up. The sly and elusive stories that make up this patchwork novel depict a rustic Poland still becalmed, while remote great events shake and topple the post-war Communist regime. For Wiola in ‘The Little Paint Girl’, elsewhere consists of the fantasy Moscow she paints to win a prize – a childish triumph whose glamour fades along with the allure of the Soviet empire itself.

First published 2014; in Swallowing Mercury, Portobello Books, 2017

‘The Rat’ by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Bill Johnston

Pitched in period and mood between Kafka and Orwell, Gombrowicz’s stories of the Twenties and Thirties filter contemporary horrors through his macabre and surreal imagination. They can still shake readers who succumb to its power. In ‘The Rat’, a fearsome brigand named only “Hooligan” falls into the clutches of a torturing judge, Skorabkowski. How can this vengeful enforcer of the law “transform the bandit’s nature” when the impenitent Hooligan mocks every physical torment? The titular rat alone – first a rodent, then a kind of absolute Platonic idea of terror – can gnaw into his soul. As in Kafka (and Orwell?), order needs transgression; but does crime also crave punishment?

First published 1937; collected in Bacacay, Archipelago Books, 2010

‘Hamlet’, by Hanna Krall, translated by Madeline G. Levine

Born in 1930s Poland to a Jewish family, Hanna Krall survived the Holocaust by “passing” as a child in a gentile family. The trauma of survival, as well as mourning for the victims, propels her later work in journalism and non-fiction narrative. She gathers and weaves true tales of the genocide and its aftermath in The Woman from Hamburg, but narrates them with all the shaping and subtlety of fiction. ‘Hamlet’ traces the unlikely career of the gay, Jewish pianist Andrzej Czajkowski. He too survived the war – dyed blond – “on the Aryan side”. Around his fantastic, melancholy voyage, Krall knots other unsettling strands of the post-war Polish-Jewish story. Settled in England, Czajkowski eventually bequeathed his skull to the RSC. David Tennant wielded it, and addressed it, in his Hamlet.

Collected in The Woman from Hamburg, and Other True Stories, Other Press, 2005

‘Mimesis’ by Pawel Huelle, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Chilly and lonely, the Baltic shores that inspire the Gdansk-born writer Pawel Huelle may feel far from the centre of things. In all his work, however, history rudely intrudes on isolation as the mainstream floods the margins – often tragically, sometimes hopefully (as in the Solidarity movement, for which Huelle worked). The Dutch Mennonite sect in ‘Mimesis’ have found a Polish refuge from persecution. Then both Nazi and Communist takeovers smash their peace and wreck their village idyll. What remains, as often with Huelle, are ruins, fragments, memories: history as a parade of ghosts and dreams.

First published 2008; collected in Cold Sea Stories, Comma Press, 2012

‘Gimpel the Fool’ by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Saul Bellow

Even though he left Poland for the US in 1935, the close-knit, myth-haunted life of the Jewish shtetl fired Singer’s imagination for the rest of his career. As did the Yiddish language of his youth, with its inalienable cargo of memories, which he never abandoned. ‘Gimpel the Fool’ – its fame, and Singer’s, accelerated by Saul Bellow’s translation – tells of a pitiable village shlemiel. The cuckold baker Gimpel serves as an archetype of hapless gullibility as his adored wife bears children to one lover after another. Yet the fool becomes a saint as well. Singer grants him transcendence as he looks forward to reward in another life, “without complication, without ridicule, without deception”.

First published 1957; in Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011

‘The Secret Sharer’ by Joseph Conrad

Replicants and doubles, impostures and facsimiles, seem to have swarmed through this selection. So why not close with that double man Konrad Korzeniowski: the dispossessed Polish exile who, via the British merchant marine, became an English literary gent? In ‘The Secret Sharer’, we will never know the exact status of Leggatt: the fugitive first-mate who rises from the waters of the Gulf of Thailand to plague, and partner, the baffled captain who gives him shelter. “Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine? It was like being haunted.” That sense of haunting lingers long after Leggatt, the captain’s “second self”, plunges back into the waves: an outcast symbol of unbelonging, “a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth”.

First published 1910; collected in The Secret Sharer and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2014

Introduction

I spend a lot of time thinking about the short stuff. I review short story collections for Mslexia, and over the last three years, dozens of stories have passed through my hands. I like brief stories that feel so well realised, they burrow into my brain and never quite leave me. I particularly like work that explores female identity and relationships – what it is to be a sister, a best friend, a girlfriend, a stranger, a lover, a mother – and the interactions between those identities. The stories below all feature relationships at their core, in one way or another, and they range between big moments and small interactions; ghosts, cannibals, girls in school uniform, women in turmoil. Each one speaks to me and I hope at least one speaks to you too.

‘Alice Baker’ by Susan Hill

This dinky brocade hardback contains just four short stories sure to chill you in the depths of winter. ‘Alice Baker’ is about a stranger struggling to fit in. A new member of staff, the eponymous Alice, creates a sense of unease in an otherwise neat and friendly office of polite people who aren’t quite sure how to respond to this strange, almost unlikeable woman. I love the loneliness of this story. Like all of Susan Hill’s gothic work, there’s an inevitable ghostly element to it, and it follows in the footsteps of ghost-nerd M. R. James, but it also made me think of the desperate sadness of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen – one of my all-time favourite books about female relationships and weird women.

Published in The Travelling Bag, Profile Books, 2016

‘Blood Rites’ by Daisy Johnson

The ancient marshy fens of East Anglia are the eerie, magical backdrop of Daisy Johnson’s debut collection Fen. In ‘Blood Rites’, the fen plays host to three female cannibals. Hunters, they’re almost vampiric as they prowl from place to place, seeking fresh flesh to devour. When locals gather for pints at the Fox and Hound, vulnerable to and yet unsuspicious of the beautiful strangers amongst them, the three women imagine they “would taste like the earth, like potatoes buried until they were done, like roots and tree bark.” The trio relate to one another and the world around them in a distorted reflection of femininity: they shave their legs and think about men, but only because that’s what they must do to survive. They stand outside looking in on what it is to be girls, to be women, and to be human – until something happens that warps their identities irreparably. Johnson has this penchant for taking young, flawed characters and placing them in the dark realm of folklore, and this story absolutely exemplifies that flair.

Published in Fen, Jonathan Cape, 2016. You can read it in The Pool

‘The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant’ by Leone Ross

Ross’s writing is sensual, brooding, playful, dark and unexpected – and nowhere more so than in this story.‘The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant’ is about love, sacrifice, misogyny, loyalty, sex and death. It does what it says on the tin: a woman takes up permanent residence in her would-be lover’s restaurant to wait patiently for his affection. The building itself cracks, shifts and breaks whenever the lovers touch too much: she’s in for a long wait, as he’s married to his job. So she waits. He sends her exquisite, off-menu dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and she waits. Customers complain about her, and she waits. Staff resent her, and she waits. The couple take great, melancholic pleasure in the simple joy of being in proximity, of having one another in sight, sharing a single kiss each day, but never truly being together. In fact, as the chef goes home each night, the mistress actually spends more time with his wife, the silent but ever-present restaurant. And there’s something quite beautiful about that too.

First published by Nightjar Press in 2015, and collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree Press, 2017, Best British Short Stories 2016, Salt, 2016 and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Penguin, 2018. Read it online at the Barcelona Review