Taksim

Novel
Original Polish title: Taksim, published in 2015 by Czarne
Translation SampleSuhrkamp | Insel
Rights sold to:

Spain (Acantilado), Catalan rights (Comanegra), France (Actes Sud), Sweden (Ersatz), Norway (Aschehoug), Slovakia (Slovart), Hungary (Magveto), Croatia (Fraktura), Slovenia (Studentska Zalozba Beletrina)


Taksim / Hinter der Blechwand
Novel
Original Polish title: Taksim, published in 2015 by Czarne
A classic Stasiuk novel set on the roads of Eastern Europe and against the waning light of a dying world
Władek and Pawel are rattling around the markets and bazaars of southern Europe in their old, clapped-out delivery van. But their second-hand clothes from “Paris-London-New York” are no longer such a hot item. Suddenly, the markets are being flooded with cheap clothes from China, ruining their business. When Władek falls in love with the girl who sells the tickets for the merry-go-round at the fair, Władek and Pawel inadvertently get caught up in the criminal machinations of a...
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Władek and Pawel are rattling around the markets and bazaars of southern Europe in their old, clapped-out delivery van. But their second-hand clothes from “Paris-London-New York” are no longer such a hot item. Suddenly, the markets are being flooded with cheap clothes from China, ruining their business. When Władek falls in love with the girl who sells the tickets for the merry-go-round at the fair, Władek and Pawel inadvertently get caught up in the criminal machinations of a network of people-smugglers. The road trip turns into a breakneck game of cat and mouse that’s no longer about counterfeit brand-name products from China, but about life and death.

Andrzej Stasiuk at the top of his game: with dry humour and a fine feeling for looming catastrophes, the great author of contemporary Polish literature tells the story of Eastern Europe being swallowed up by the process of globalisation.
»Stasiuk dominates a genre that oscillates between microdetail and the description of an almost fantastical underworld.« Mercedes Monmany, ABC

»One of the most beautiful aspects of this book is the glittering, balanced, and sensual prose in which Stasiuk elaborates his stories, and the free spirit with which he reconstructs the past.« Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia

»Perhaps the most refreshing, innovative, and exciting writer there is in Europe today. Stasiuk is a miracle.« Manuel Astur, El Comercio

»Taksim is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.« Ilya U. Topper, Estado Crítico
»Stasiuk dominates a genre that oscillates between microdetail and the description of an almost fantastical underworld.« Mercedes Monmany, ABC

»One of the most beautiful aspects of this book is the glittering, balanced, and sensual prose in which Stasiuk elaborates his stories, and the free spirit with which he reconstructs the past.« Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia

»Perhaps the most refreshing, innovative, and exciting writer there is in Europe today....
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2015, 350 pages

Persons

Andrzej Stasiuk, born in Warsaw in 1960, has been living in the Beskides since 1986. He writes poems, stories, novels, also works as a journalist and scriptwriter and together with his wife Monika Sznajderman directs the publishing house Czarne located in Wolowiec. He has received numerous literary awards, among them the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize for Literature (2002), the Nike Prize (Poland, 2005) for Jadąc do Babadag, the Adalbert Stifter Prize (2005), the Vilenica Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2016).

Andrzej Stasiuk, born in Warsaw in 1960, has been living in the Beskides since 1986. He writes poems, stories, novels, also works as a...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Crossing
Year of Publication: 2021
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2021
It’s June of 1941, a few days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In a village along the Bug River, German soldiers have taken up quarters, while Polish partisans are hiding out...
Rights sold to:

Spain (Acantilado), France (Actes Sud), Sweden (Ersatz), Croatia (Fraktura), Slovenia (Cankarjeva Založba)

The Beskid Chronicles
Year of Publication: 2018
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2018
Andrzej Stasiuk is an author who often seeks out the great yonder in his writing. In The Beskid Chronicles, though, he turns his inimitable eye to his homeland of Poland, a country undergoing rapid and often subtle transformations. The book gathers together feature articles and poetic miniatures written by Stasiuk between 2013 and 2018 for the Polish weekly paper Tygodnik...
The East
Year of Publication: 2015
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2015
The sum of his travels and writings – recorded in one epic stream and told through captivating episodes and epiphanies. Stasiuk heads east from Poland, traversing Russia and heading into China in...
Rights sold to:

France (Actes Sud), Sweden (Ersatz), Czech Republic (Kniha Zlin, s. r. o), Slovakia (Slovart), Croatia (Fraktura), Ukraine (Old Lion),

There Are No Expressways on Golden Roads
Year of Publication: 2013
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2013
Nobody is more at home on the road than the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk. The fifty prose vignettes gathered in this collection narrate journeys through sparsely populated regions on the Polish-Ukrainian border, the steppes of Siberia, and the vast, open spaces of China and Mongolia.

A declaration of love for untrodden paths and neglected regions, wandering through memories and dreams...
A Short Book about Dying
Year of Publication: 2012
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2012
Andrzej Stasiuk, famous for the artfulness with which he describes deteriorating places and disappearing landscapes, tells four stories about death and departure. There is Augustyn, his writer...
Rights sold to:

Spain (Acantilado), France (Actes Sud), Italy (Atmosphere Libri), Hungary (Magveto),

Post-Scriptum Diary
Year of Publication: 2010
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2010
Andrzej Stasiuk has never written about Poland and the West with the same wrath as he does here, in the wake of his most recent travels through the Balkans. Having returned from countries with “real personalities”, where minarets loom over minefields and burial grounds, Stasiuk bristles about some of the contradictions in his home country: dreaming of martyrdom but then choosing...
Dojczland
Year of Publication: 2007
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2007
The narrator, a literary guest worker doing a punishing tour of readings in Germany, makes no secret of the fact that he'd have been happier to find the train drawing into Bucharest Gara de Nord...
Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: France (Christian Bourgois), Romania (RAO)

Fado
Year of Publication: 2006
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2006
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,...
Rights sold to:

Slovenia (Cankarjeva založba)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Dalkey Archive), France (Christian Bourgois), Romania (RAO), Ukraine (Grani-T)

On the Road to Babadag
Year of Publication: 2004
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2004
Herds of cows on a stretch of rail tracks beyond Oradea, sheep on a suburban street in Satu Mare, a white horse grazing in the middle of Suceava – the dirtiest, remotest, most god-forsaken part of...
Rights sold to:

USA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Spanish world rights (Quaderns Crema/El Acantilado), Chinese simplex rights (Guangdong Flower City Publishing House), Sweden (Ersatz), Slovakia (Absynt), Turkey (Livera)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: UK (Harvill Secker), Russia (NLO), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Bompiani), Netherlands (De Geus), Finland (Like), Hungary (Magvetö), Bulgaria (Paradox), Romania (RAO), Lithuania (Kitos Knygos), Croatia (Fraktura), Serbia (Dereta), Slovenia (Beletrina), Albania (Mesonjetorja)

Winter
Year of Publication: 2001
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2001
»You’re not going to end up on the junkheap«, says Grzesiek to his orange Syrena sedan as he drives along the Polish-Slovakian border with a bootful of copper wiring. »I’ll find someone for you. Maybe a pensioner. He’ll look after you, and the two of you can grow old together.«

Like in Stasiuk’s famous Galician Stories,...
Galician Tales
Year of Publication: 2001
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2001
If you enjoyed Dukla you'll be equally enthusiastic about Galician Tales. Because Stasiuk's literary landscape, south-east Poland, the forgotten province in the years following...
Rights sold to:

Spanish world rights (Acantilado), Serbia (Heliks), Ukraine (Old Lion)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: France (Christian Bourgois), Netherlands (De Geus), Slovakia (Slovart), Bulgaria (Paradox), Slovenia (Cankarjeva Zalozba), India (Hindi; Rajkamal Prakashan)

My Europe
Year of Publication: 2000
Juri Andruchowytsch, Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2000
In these »two essays on the strangest part of the world«, Yuri Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk offer a stereoscopic portrait of Central Europe. On foot and by car, they travelled together between...
Rights sold to:

Spanish world rights (Acantilado), France (Noir sur Blanc), Italy (print edition Mimesis / digital edition GoWare), Hungary (Kijarat), Bulgaria (Lektura), Romania (Polirom)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Czech Republic (Periplum), Croatia (Fraktura)

Cardboard Airplane
Year of Publication: 2000
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 2000

Impressions from Central Europe, a metaphor of the ›variety of worlds‹: a medial cosmos here, the disposability of each and every possible information, a fallen into decay sanatorium there, a ›Galician Magic Mountain‹.

Andrzej Stasiuk's essays and autobiographic album is not only a mirrot of authors – such as his preferred ones: Beckett, Hrbal and Platonow –, books...
Nine
Year of Publication: 1999
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1999
Nine is a brilliant novel from one of Europe's finest writers. It tells of a post-communist generation of young Poles among whom the strictures of the old collide daily with the freedom of...
Rights sold to:

USA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), UK (Harvill Secker), Spanish world rights (Acantilado), Italy (Giunti), Amharic (Hohe)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Russia (Azbooka), France (Christian Bourgois), Netherlands (De Geus), Sweden (print rights: Norstedts; digital rights: Ersatz), Slovenia (Beletrina), Hungary (Magvetö), Bulgaria (Paradox), Romania (RAO), Croatia (Fraktura), Serbia (Booka)

How I Became a Writer
Year of Publication: 1998
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1998
There are few examples where adolescent rebellion, not only under communism, has been described more pointedly or more scathingly. Being drafted into the army signals the end for Stasiuk of nights on...
Rights sold to:

France (Actes Sud), Ukraine (Discursus)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Korea (Saemulgyul), Czech Republic (Prostor), Hungary (Poket), Romania (Paralela)

Dukla
Year of Publication: 1997
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1997
»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...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Dalkey Archive), Spanish world rights (Acantilado), Slovenia (Beletrina), Turkey (Livera), Azerbaijan (Alatoran)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Russia (NLO), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Bompiani), Sweden (print rights; Norstedts), Sweden (digital rights; Ersatz), Norway (Aschehoug), Slovakia (Baum), Hungary (Magvetö)

Across the River
Year of Publication: 1996
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1996
This collection of twelve interrelated stories by Andrzej Stasiuk begins with three beautiful sketches from his childhood. The scenes are of modest processions, not particularly festive, but full of reverent wonder: walking to church, to the library, to religion class. First explorations of the magical and the erotic in an untouched sphere full of secrets, in which the allures of love can be...
The White Raven
Year of Publication: 1995
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1995
Five old school friends in post-communist Warsaw. Now all fathers in their early thirties, they head off into the unknown. Sick of their everyday lives, they let the melancholic and charismatic Wasyl...
Rights sold to:

UK (Serpent’s Tail), Russia (Azbooka), France (Noir sur Blanc), Italy (Bompiani), Netherlands (De Geus), Finland (Taifuuni), Hungary (Europa), Bulgaria (Paradox), Serbia (Clio)

The Walls of Hebron
Year of Publication: 1992
Andrzej StasiukYear of Publication: 1992
Stasiuk's legendary debut, and new editions have been repeatedly brought out in 1992 in Poland, continues to irritate and fascinated readers. To describe the violent reality of everyday prison life the author summed up all his powers of poetic exaggeration such as was to also be the hallmark of his later writings.

In this work, Stasiuk looks at the world with an unflinching and...