Kod mocnog anđela (Pod mocnym aniołem), Beograd: Narodna Knjiga - Alfa, 2003
Slovak:
Pod mocným anjelom (Pod mocnym aniołem), Bratislava: Drewo a Srd, 2003
Slovenian:
Pri mogočnem angelu (Pod mocnym aniołem), Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2004
Spanish:
Casa del Ángel Fuerte (Pod mocnym aniołem), Barcelona: Acantilado, 2004
Otros placeres (Inne rozkosze), Barcelona: Acantilado, 2005
Pilch Jerzy
(born 1952) - author of fiction and newspaper articles, for many years a regular contributor to the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, and since 1999 Polityka, to which he transferred his column. Initially a university tutor of Polish and an enterprising literary critic, he took up the art of writing relatively late. His debut was a collection of stories, The Confessions of a Closet Peddler of Erotic Literature (1988), which features an idiosyncratic chronicle of Kraków society in the 1980s. In it, Pilch has painted satirical portraits of some of Kraków’s literary celebrities, and has peppered his stories with allusions to comical events known only to the initiated. This book won him the prestigious Kościelski Foundation award. In the early 1990s he joined the staff of the weekly paper Tygodnik Powszechny, which is a valuable contributor to Polish culture, and became a regular columnist. His best articles for it have been published in three collections: Despair at the Loss of a Cart (1994), Thoughts on Stupidity, Drinking and Dying (1997) and Irretrievably Lost Left-Handedness (1998). Pilch’s great invention as a writer is that he has an original way of combining genres: his columns are like literary nuggets that he has extracted from the realm of journalism and given a life of their own. Earlier, or perhaps in parallel, Pilch won the hearts of the reading public with his traditional novels, The Register of Adulteresses (1993) and Other Pleasures (1995). Pilch's fiction, and to some extent his excellent articles too, rely on satirical renditions of his own autobiographical experiences. He enjoys looking back on his carefree childhood spent in a small town in the mountains where the Evangelical population were in the majority. However, his writing is not sentimental, but rather it has an undercurrent of bitter nostalgia and wistfulness about the passage of time and the omnipresence of death. The style Pilch has developed, light and at the same time elaborate, full of puns and wordplay, while also extremely ironical, can be quite deceptive. At heart, his funny, appealing prose, is very serious, especially where he says a lot about himself - as in the novel A Thousand Peaceful Cities (1997), in which he makes a nostalgic journey into the 1960s, back to his delightful childhood to revive the memory of his late father, and as in his most acclaimed work, the 2001 NIKE prize-winner Under the Mighty Angel (2000), where he describes the hell of alcoholism, or to be precise the thousands of lies told by drunkards, whose lying the narrator compares to literary inventiveness.
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
