Where: Solas Bar, 232 East 9th Street, 2nd Floor (between Second & Third Avenues), New York, NY<\/p>\n
To register for this session, send us an email at poland.nyc@europeanbookclub.org<\/p>\n
The Book: <\/p>\n
The Mighty Angel begins with its alcoholic narrator, Jerzy, having returned home from the \u201calco ward\u201d for the eighteenth and final time. A beautiful July day. He\u2019s at home, listening to a record by the Czech saxophonist Feliks Slovak, and through the window notices a \u201cwoman in a yellow dress with spaghetti straps\u201d withdrawing money from an ATM<\/span> then walking off into the distance. Smitten at once, inspired by Slovak\u2019s saxophone and the \u201cgoodly quantity of peach vodka\u201d in the bottle on the table, he leaves his home \u201cprepared to scour the entire city\u201d in search of her. <\/p>\n The narrative continues according to the disjointed logic of dreams and benders, in what critic Maria Janion calls its \u201cwonderful, delirious and baroque style.\u201d Jerzy describes the various other denizens of the alco ward: Don Juan the Rib, Simon Pure Goodness, Christopher Columbus the Explorer, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labor, et al., as well as Doctor Granada, Nurse Viola, and the therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol, and recounts their various adventures. He dips into reminiscences about his Lutheran grandfather, Old Kubica, and the heroically alcoholic family doctor of his childhood, Dr. Swobodziczka, as well as memories of his various ex-girlfriends: Joanna Catastrophe, Barb the Broker, the Seductive Movie Star, and the Utterly Irresponsible Minx. But the object of his devotion throughout the book continues to be the \u201cwoman in the yellow dress,\u201d and as much as this book is a funny and provocative rumination on unrepentant alcoholism and its relationship to literature, it is likewise a bittersweet negotiation of love and the capacity (and incapacity) to change.<\/p>\n The Mighty Angel was awarded Poland\u2019s prestigious NIKE<\/span> Literary Award in 2001. Exquisitely translated by Bill Johnston, it is one of the strongest and most representative works of recent Polish literature to be made available in English. Open Letter Books will publish the novel in April 2009. An excerpt can be read now at the Pen America website. JERZY<\/span> PILCH<\/span> is one of Poland\u2019s most important contemporary writers. In addition to his 20-year career as a columnist for two of Poland\u2019s best known weeklies (Tygodnik Powszechny and Polityka) Pilch has published over a dozen books and won Poland\u2019s prestigious NIKE<\/span> Literary Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. Public intellectual and provocateur, Pilch has written novels, essays, and most recently drama, that poke fun at various aspects of contemporary Polish society: the Krakow art scene, the world of writers, the cult around Pope John Paul, etc. He is a master stylist whom no less an authority than Czeslaw Milosz deemed \u201cthe hope of young Polish prose.\u201d His novels have been translated into many languages, but he has only one other work so far available in English, His Current Woman (Northwestern University Press, 2002). Bill Johnston is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Indiana University and Director of the Polish Studies Center there. Recipient in 2008 of the first Found in Translation Award for his translation of Tadeusz Rozewicz\u2019s New Poems (Archipelago Books, 2007), Johnston has translated three books by Magdalena Tulli, Witold Gombrowicz\u2019s Bacacay, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski\u2019s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, Andrzej Stasiuk\u2019s Nine, and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki\u2019s poetry collection Peregrinary, and many other books. About The Mighty Angel:<\/p>\n \u201c[The Mighty Angel] is another entry in the Polish national \u2018spiritiad\u2019 of literature about drinking. Pilch masterfully plays with the tradition of the drunkard novel, demonstrating just how close the alcoholic\u2019s self-fashioning is to the writer\u2019s self-narration. In this way, Pilch\u2019s novel constitutes an act of belief in literature.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s wonderful, delirious and baroque style imparts the experience of dependence, exclusion, and loneliness, as well as the overcoming of loneliness through love.\u201d -Literary critic and scholar Maria Janion, head of the jury for the 2001 NIKE<\/span> Literary Award<\/p>\n \u201cIn this book, Pilch prattles on and on remorselessly in his masterly way, bends the reader\u2019s ear, fills the mind, grips the attention-and before you know where you are, you\u2019ve reached the end of the book.\u201d -Lech Mergler<\/p>\n About His Current Women:<\/p>\n Review of Contemporary Fiction: \u201cThat this novel is truly hilarious at times is just a bonus. Pilch is a wonderfully descriptive writer, and we can hope that the rest of his body of work comes into English soon. His Current Woman is an enjoyable little book that whets the appetite for more.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAbout the Author<\/p>\n
\nAbout the Translator<\/p>\n
\nRemarks and Reviews<\/p>\n