The Stack
The Stack includes new chunks of paper like Andrzej Stasiuk’s Nine. Read the Wikipedia entry here.
From the jacket:
Pawel, a young businessman in debt to loan sharks, wakes up one April morning in a sea of debris, broken glass, ripped upholstery, and clothes spilling out of the wardrobe. He turns to two friends for help: Bolek, a former coal miner, now a drug dealer who lives in tasteless luxury; and Jacek, an addict, who is himself on the run through Warsaw, a washed-out city, a hostile landscape of apartment blocks, railroad stations, wild gardens, factories, and suburban wastelands.
In this novel Andrzej Stasiuk portrays a generation of Poles, freed from outdated ideologies but left feeling adrift and disconnected from family, neighbors, and friends. At once existential crime fiction and a work of art, Nine establishes Stasiuk as a major voice in European literature.
Sure. I’m not a judge. But this book is full of places and character names I have never seen, voices different from any I’ve stumbled across even under the spell of the best Vodka. An excerpt used without permission:
“When she came out of the Stoklosy metro station, she called. No reply at Pawel’s place. the sky over Stegny and Wilanow was the color of the public telephone and as cold as the receiver in her hand. Nearby, a red mailbox mounted on the wall, an empty Krolewskie beer bottle on top. The wind blew; from the phone, from somewhere deep in the city, an electronic beeping.”
Or this:
“In the garish light over the pool table, hands, cuffs, and cues. The players circled lazily. They took off their jackets. Their shirts as if cut from black paper. Smoke gathered and hung beneath the lamp. The balls scattered with a crack, and one man said: ‘F*** Sarajevo.’ They moved slowly, prepared in an instant to leave on serious business. In their veins, not blood but images of actions. They were actors in a reality they had made up, because the time when sons repeated the gestures of their fathers was over.”
Order it from us, because that box in c-burg won’t have it. info@blacksburgreads.com
