THE STREET OF CROCODILES, BRUNO SCHULZ: …Polish interwar surrealism, I guess? Hard to describe. Very episodic. Schulz has the kind of lush, hothouse prose I associate with certain fantasy authors–Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, that kind of thing–and the book is basically a series of bizarre, creepy, sad things happening in a small Polish town with a commercial quarter. I found it so episodic that it had a hard time keeping my attention, but I’d accept the judgment that this is my problem, not the book’s.

I will say that there’s a bit where the mad father turns into a cockroach, which effectively proves that having one’s father turn into a cockroach would be much more disturbing than merely turning into a cockroach oneself. So if anyone ever asks you which one you’d rather, you know what to tell them.