Pawel Kohoutek, veterinarian and womanizer, looks out the window one morning to see his mistress approaching his house. That's bad. She is hauling her suitcase (containing her books) and her backpack (containing everything else she owns). That's worse. So Kohoutek does the only thing he can: He hides his current woman in the attic of the family slaughterhouse. Farce ensues as Kohoutek attempts to hide the woman from his eccentric family, their lodgers, and various offbeat visitors. A best-seller in Jerzy Pilch's native Poland, His Current Woman is an enjoyable literary send-up of what often passes for love.

His Current Woman

Literature & Fiction

Pilch, Jerzy

Humor & Satire

Northwestern University Press

"Pilch's prose is masterful, and the bulk of The Mighty Angel evokes the same numb, floating sensation as a bottle of Zloldkowa Gorzka."—L Magazine
The Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released—a sober and, more or less, healthy man—after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.
While he's in rehab, Jerzy collects the stories of his fellow alcoholics—Don Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labor—in an effort to tell the universal, and particular, story of the alcoholic, and to discover the motivations and drives that underlie the alcoholic's behavior.
A simultaneously tragic, comic, and touching novel, The Mighty Angel displays Pilch's caustic humor, ferocious intelligence, and unparalleled mastery of storytelling.
Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.
Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University and has translated works by Witold Gombrowicz, Magdalena Tulli, Wieslaw Mysliwski, and others. He won the Best Translated Book Award in 2012 and the inaugural Found in Translation Award in 2008.

The Mighty Angel

Contemporary

Open Letter

"If laughter actually is the best medicine, fortunate readers of this wonderful novel will surely enjoy perfect health for the rest of their days."―Kirkus Reviews
A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist "thaw." The narrator, Jerzyk ("little Jerzy"), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father's closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, and would-be Polish insurrectionist. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Traba and the narrator's father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka―assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme...
Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.
David Frick is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Literary

"Pilch's antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch."Barnes &amp; Noble Review
Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddles the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character's lyrical ode to the fate of his father's perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher's desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator's excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.
The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.
Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.
David Frick is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

My First Suicide

Bezpowrotnie utracona leworęczność (Polish Edition)

Wydawn. Literackie

Pod mocnym aniołem (Polish Edition)

Portret mlodej wenecjanki

Literackie

Moje Pierwsze Samobojstwo (English and Polish Edition)

Świat Książki

Marsz Polonia Op

Un hombre poseído por el demonio del tacto y, a la vez, incansable coleccionista de aventuras eróticas (le acompaña una envidiada reputación de Don Juan) se encuentra por sorpresa con la presencia de su amante más reciente en la casa familiar. Lo disparatado de la situación, la cantidad de peripecias insólitas que provoca y

Otros placeres (Spanish Edition)

Acantilado

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