Set in Communist Poland in the 1950s, the harrowing story of one man's unraveling after a drunken slip of the tongue lands him in jail.
One of the most significant postwar Polish novels, this is the story of a modern Job whose eyes are opened to the emptiness that underlies the system he has bel[...]
"Hlasko's story comes off the page at you like a pit bull."--The Washington Post "His writing is taut and psychologically nuanced like that of the great dime-store novelist Georges Simenon, his novelistic world as profane as Isaac Babel's."--Wall Street Journal "Spokesman for those who were angry [...]
"Hlasko was an original. His novels were fearless, his vision unsparing, and decades later, his darkly brilliant work has lost none of its power to unsettle. He achieved what few other writers ever have: he turned the literary landscape into a much more interesting place than it was when he found it[...]