“The books we read in childhood don’t exist anymore...

...they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind…”

"To be as gifted, as visionary a writer and artist as Bruno Schulz was and to be forgotten is both terrifying and disgraceful. As his self-portraits suggest, Schulz was a timid, introverted soul, whose world ended at the city limits of his hometown - the Eastern Galician backwater Drohobych. His short story collections Cinnamon Shops (also known as The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass are phantasms in the early mystical-modernist sense; they elude reason (”poetry occurs when reason is short-circuited”) and traditional narrative existing on their own logical terms, in their own world even. His is prose intensified until it becomes poetry, full of harrowing personal events (images of enveloping beds, chamberpots, poverty and illness) turned epic and otherworldly. His writing is florid, expansive, surreal but never transcendent. It may take flight but it never escapes. It’s rooted in the streets of Drohobych. He studies existence like insects under magnifying glass, the heightened scale revealing the inherent wonder and terror in the simplest things. There’s always the sense that Schulz is seeing the world in such high definition that it appears teeming and squirming, even the static is in motion, the inanimate engaged in sinister conspiracies...

In Schulz’s stories, grown men live under floorboards with insects. Weeds turn feral. Mannequins reinvent the world. Jesters stone mutated birds to death. Specks of dust contain embryos. Forgotten rooms stir unseen into life. Cripples crawl on all fours by moonlight. Old men are carried off into the sky by the wind. Cities turn into labryinths at nightfall. All terrible and fantastic in the original sense of both words."

- 3:AM Cult Hero: Bruno Schulz