Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk translated by Bill Johnston Dalkey Archive Press, April 2010
In this delightful collection of essays - by turns wry and reflective, wistful and witty - contemporary Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk turns his attention to the villages and small towns of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and of course his native Poland. Stasiuk travels to places no tourist would think of visiting, and in his characteristically lyrical prose, lays out his own unique and challenging perspective on the fascinating, unknown heart of Central Europe. He reminds us of the area’s extraordinarily rich cultural and ethnic makeup, explores its literature, and shows how its history is inscribed permanently in its landscapes. Above all, he describes with fascination how past, present, and future co-exist and intertwine along the highways and back roads of the region. Stasiuk, exploring a region that so many have assumed to be irresistibly converging with the West, has mapped what Freud might have called its 'genetic memory.'
– Benjamin Moser, Harper's Magazine
Andrzej Stasiuk has had one of the most stunning careers of Polish writers who first published after 1989. In the early 1980s, as a pacifist, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison - an experience that inspired his debut novel, The Walls of Hebron. In his youth in Warsaw, he wrote mainly for underground magazines; but soon after his first book came out, he moved from the capital to a village in the Beskid mountains in southern Poland, where he and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, run the esteemed publishing house Wydawnictwo Czarne, and where he has since written over a dozen more books, including several available in English: The White Raven (2001), Tales of Galicia (2003), Nine (2007), and Fado (2009). Stasiuk has won Poland's most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, for his collection of travel essays Going to Babadag (forthcoming in English with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); and at the invitation of the Polish Cultural Institute, he will be a guest of this year's PEN World Voices Festival in New York, April 28 - May 2, 2010.
