Dalkey Archive Press

This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius...

At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is write a book about light. The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small...

As in his novel The Polish Complex, Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse stars a narrator and character named Konwicki, who has been asked to set himself on fire that evening in front of the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw in an act of protest. He accepts the commission, but without any clear idea of whether he will actually go through with the...