Finding this level of appreciation of Schulz is unexpected, even in these small numbers.
I have 6 books¹ on the shelf above my bed. One is The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz reprint. I acquired it because I never resolved losing the copy of Street of Crocodiles that I carried around in my late teens and early twenties. Nothing else ever tweaked my perceptions like that did.
¹: Four are on my read list. The remaining book is The Secret Teaching of All Ages by Manly P. Hall. It's illustrations self-explain why it is there.
His writing is a drug - you can inhale any of it and get sucked into his fractal dream world pretty quickly. Literary DMT?
That's also an evasive way of saying I don't remember what my favorites are and don't have the books handy. But there are only two of them and they aren't long.
This won't be helpful to anybody, least of all you, but I'm like 2 stories in ("August" and "Visitation") and this is so Neutral Milk Hotel that I sort of assume Jeff Mangum stole all his lyrics from Schulz.
To anyone else here: you can get Street of Crocodiles off the Internet Archive and it's a quick read (at least so far).
I have a fantasy that one day his lost novel The Messiah will be discovered under a floorboard or behind some crumbling plaster in Drohobych.
Either that or (second best) someone else will tune into it and write something crazy about what it was and how it dissolved into the cosmos.
The thing about Schulz's writing is the unbearably poignant specificity of where and when he lived. Imaginative genius refracted through that specificity is the magic. And that world is gone. I suppose it died the moment that he did.
Also got sucked into Street of Crocodiles (Penguin Classics translation) due to dang's bio. My favorite story is Cinnamon Shops; a few minutes into reading it, and I'm relaxed, like a kind of meditation.
I saw the exposition of their movie sets (basically incredible dollhouses and puppets) in New York's MoMA. Much more intersting and beautiful than the movie itself IMO.
I have 6 books¹ on the shelf above my bed. One is The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz reprint. I acquired it because I never resolved losing the copy of Street of Crocodiles that I carried around in my late teens and early twenties. Nothing else ever tweaked my perceptions like that did.
¹: Four are on my read list. The remaining book is The Secret Teaching of All Ages by Manly P. Hall. It's illustrations self-explain why it is there.