For Halloween, “Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse” by M. G. Turner

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My dad and I share an affinity for the legendary literary character Faust, who in various retellings over the centuries has been depicted as selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a number of enticing rewards, including immortal life, admiration from the public, endless amounts of money, and much more. For Philip, this interest goes back to his student days, when with a professor named Donald Sheehan he took a course at Franconia College called “Faust,” and wrote a paper on the topic. Then a few years ago, I undertook the writing of what I call a “novella in verse” which retells the Faust legend for our modern times. With these materials in hand we decided to publish another in the series of chapbooks I’ve brought out this year under our Riverside Press imprint (preceded by Dreams of the Romantics and Roman Visions), using my pen name M. G. Turner. Collected with the narrative poem are two other devilish tales I’ve written, “The Tale of Hanns Drumpf” and “Johann Fust: Patron of Gutenberg,” plus Philip’s essay from 1974, “Faust: Man and Myth.” We believe all this writing goes well together and are now happy to announce publication of Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse for Halloween. For those who would like to buy a copy from us directly before we begin distributing it online, we are selling them for 13 dollars plus 5 dollars shipping.

To learn a little more about our new title, here is the back cover copy:

The “Faust” legend is as old as time, as is the proverbial “deal with the devil.” In M. G. Turner’s Reader Faustus this idea is brought into a modern context, as a young poet chooses to sell his soul in exchange for the power to read every book ever written. While Turner’s “novella in verse” hearkens back to Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1601), Goethe’s Faust (1808), and Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947)—Reader Faustus zeroes in on today’s zeitgeist, in which people feel burdened to consume endless content, and who see Faustian bargains all around them, in politics, technology, science, and the arts. Readers of the macabre will surely enjoy this new offering, a veritable museum of Faust, from the author of Dreams of the Romantics.

I’m honored to have received two endorsements in advance of publication:

“The Faust legend is ever regenerative and ever redefined, as seen in M. G. Turner’s beguiling new verse tale Reader Faustus. In elegant, Augustan rhyming couplets, Turner tells the story of the devil’s bargain anew, but with a focus on the wages of modernity, when those who create are cursed by having to consume ever more content. Clever, thoughtful, and fun, Reader Faustus uses classical language to speak to very contemporary problems.”—Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and Editor of Belt Magazine

“M. G. Turner’s richly imaginative Reader Faustus offers a new twist on the devil’s bargain. In verse both erudite and playful, Turner asks us to reflect on what we might offer in exchange for our pursuit of both knowledge and enjoyment. While Turner takes glee in the use of antique language and form, the poem is also uncannily modern, as it proposes a complex relationship between the ability to consume content and the ability to create content—a relationship that is always under negotiation, and which has become particularly fraught in our digital age. As Turner’s work recognizes, the stakes for this bargain have never been higher.”—Brandon Grafius, author of Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture 

We hope you find the Faust legend as compelling as we do, and will be interested in visiting, and reading, our “veritable museum of Faust.” Please let us know!

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M. G. Turner: “‘False Memories & Eldritch Interludes’ is a spooky delight”

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A review by Ewan “M. G.” Turner of a new horror-inflected book:

False Memories & Eldritch Interludes is a spooky delight! Part-memoir, part tall tale, author Joseph Citro takes a novel approach by making himself known to readers in among a series of stories, narratives, and as he calls them, “eldritch” interludes. If that word is familiar it’s because it was popularized by fellow New England writer H.P. Lovecraft, whom Citro acknowledges as a major influence, as he was on so many, acting as a model for all who preserve local history in that most gothic region. Citro’s writing itself is excellent—personal and touching, and as a fellow horror writer/enthusiast myself, it is special to meet him in these ingenious pages. Along the way you feel less like you’re reading a book and more like you’re in the presence of a great storyteller who is weaving narratives that at first seem opposed to each other but surprise you with their profound resonance.

It is also a joy to read stories and then have them commented upon by the omniscient writer’s voice in welcome “Behind the Scenes” sections which provide an excellent dichotomy between fright and fable, and give you an even deeper view into the author—something Lovecraft himself was never able to do, but Citro does remarkably well and without it feeling contrived or too self-referential. Also, I should add that it is very refreshing to read work like this, though I hesitate to describe it as “no-nonsense.” Instead what I mean is that you have the feeling of being given a chance to see the inner workings of a seasoned writer’s mind and with him as a guide we’ll live to tell the tale! (Also, it’s just nice to read something unpretentious in style and yet extremely deep in terms of content, a nearly impossible feat to pull off.)

Favorite pieces in the collection include: “Them Bald-Headed Snays”; “Soul-Keeper”; “Kirby”; and “The Last Fortune Cookie.” “False Memories” is a must-read for all horror enthusiasts and for people who enjoy the work of highly skilled writers who tell stories connected to their local communities and expand upon and ultimately craft their own urban legends. Last, evocative illustrations by Corey Forman round out the package nicely.  It’s available on Amazon.

The Vermonter publication has described Joe Citro as “Vermont’s most recognized authority on ghosts, haunting, and the state’s mysterious past. He’s written many fascinating books on the subject, including his bestselling work, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors.” Citro really is a New England treasure, as is clear in this 2020 profile in Seven Days magazine.

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Powerful Endorsements for “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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September 15, 2025 update:

Along with all the terrific endorsements the author and publisher have received for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard (shown below), we now also have an enthusiastic Publishers Weekly review (“A perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist.”), which was quickly shared by the proprietor of the popular Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook**, where it’s generating more enthusiasm and pre-orders ahead of the book’s launch on November 4.
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As announced previously on this website, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard, the first biography of the notable American author, will be published on November 4, 2025, in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook by Blackstone Publishing. The book has garnered powerful endorsements so far, from writers Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, Colum McCann, Carl Hiassen, John Matteson, William Souder, and Jim Fergus, as shown below.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, here are links for doing so:

Bookshop.org (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support  independent bookstores), 2) Barnes & Noble, 3) Books-A-Million, and 4) Amazon.
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Advance Praise for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

“Devouring Time is a massive achievement, a deep plunge into the life of Jim Harrison whose 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry line our shelves. Atavistic, inspired, despairing, gluttonous, turbo-charged, and broken-hearted, the gut strings of what drove Harrison are plucked, page by page until his high-wire obsessions, his “beggar’s banquets” of eating, drinking, traveling, and writing finally recede. What lasts are the words.”—Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“Jim Harrison is and always will be one of my great heroes. He emerges from Todd Goddard’s splendid Devouring Time in vivid technicolor, and indeed shadow, as if he could walk off the page at any moment, sounding out his American yawp. Gracefully rendered and impeccably researched, Goddard intimately charts the free-flowing river that was Harrison’s life, its headwaters and tributaries, the glistening shallows and eddies, and the dark charging currents that carved channels through the literary landscape. His timeless poetry and fiction, singular joie de vivre, boundless appetites and intellect, as well as his unerring commitment to wisdom and wildness, resound on every page. One of our most cherished writers, Jim Harrison has landed in the hands of a worthy biographer. An absolute pleasure to read, Devouring Time resonates with me still.”—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

“My friend Jim Harrison always seemed a fiercely untameable subject for a biographer, but I think Devouring Time will stand as a complete and moving portrait. Jim was one of those rare writers whose private life was as adventurous as their works, but only a dogged journalist could have tracked down all the tales. Todd Goddard tells the whole story in a way that Jim would have admired – raw and revealing, yet with a sensitive eye for both the pain and the talent that made Jim one of modern America’s most intriguing poets and novelists.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Bad Monkey and Fever Beach

Jim Harrison, Paris, 1971. Credit: Dan Gerber

“Jim Harrison lived a big life, and he has long deserved a gargantuan biography, both in size and spirit. And this is what Todd Goddard has given us. All by itself, the meticulously rendered story of how Harrison’s prose masterpiece Legends of the Fall came into being would be ample reward for the curious reader. But Goddard has given us immeasurably more. Impeccably researched, sensitively written, Devouring Time gives us a man — one who experienced the very depths of pain but found there the building blocks of enduring art. Cruelly battered by adversity, Harrison nevertheless infused his world with transcendent song. Read in conjunction with his own work, Devouring Time completes his testament.”—John Matteson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“A feast of a biography that does full justice to a writer whose vast appetites…for books, food, sex, success, and a life in the wild…fueled a prodigious and prolific talent. Sweeping yet judicious, written with grace and restraint, Devouring Time deftly captures a life that veered between exhilaration and despair, impoverishment and acclaim. A keen-eyed and sensitive interpreter of Harrison’s writing, especially his poetry, Todd Goddard also grapples with his subject’s manifold excesses and insecurities. Harrison’s long marriage to his wife Linda, to whom he was serially unfaithful but never faithless, anchored his tempestuous personality. Their often-challenged devotion to each other is the beating heart of this moving portrayal of an artist who craved domesticity but could never live entirely within its boundaries. An exquisite, indelible book.”—William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“Let me just say upfront that any other writers who are working on, and/or planning to write a biography about the life and times of poet/novelist Jim Harrison, I would suggest that you hang up your pens and pencils, fold up your laptops, and turn your literary attentions elsewhere. Todd Goddard here delivers the most definitive possible such work, a book brilliantly constructed, comprehensive and artfully written.

I was a close friend of Jim Harrison’s for thirty-seven years (among, of course, many others) right up until the evening of his death. I thought in that time (as many of us did) that I had heard virtually all of Jim’s stories, some more than once, for he was a consummate storyteller, frequently with alternate versions of his tales, and never too shy to talk about himself.

Herein are the rich details of the life and career of one of America’s sometimes overlooked literary geniuses, a man devoted to his art, who pushed his talents, and body, to the limit, from the rarefied world of poetry, to fiction and novels, to screenplays on the other end of the spectrum. Along the way, the reader will learn a great deal about the complicated and sometimes cutthroat literary and film businesses, as well as meet a vast array of friends, family members and colleagues who peopled Jim’s world.

There are no punches pulled here; like so many creative geniuses, Jim Harrison had his dark side, fueled by alcoholism of which he himself was more than well aware. This is a big book, and not just in size, that tells the story of an extraordinary character unlike any other, a man so totally out of the ordinary, that those of us who knew him personally, forgive him all his excesses, remember his humor and generosity, and will miss his presence on earth until the day we die.”—Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

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Excitedly Anticipating Publication of “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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May 27 2025 update:

For fans of Jim Harrison eager to have their copy of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life as soon as possible upon publication November 4, 2025, please click through to the websites of major book retailers below, using the pre-order/buy buttons provided:

1) Bookshop.org/for pre-ordering Devouring Time (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support many independent bookstores)  2) Barnes & Noble/for pre-ordering Devouring Time   3) Books-A-Million/for pre-ordering Devouring Time  4) Amazon

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May 22, 2025
As reported on this website in April 2020, for our author client Todd Goddard, Philip Turner Book Productions sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life to Blackstone Publishing. Due to the pandemic, a number of key archives were inaccessible for 2-3 years but the author persevered and his book, the first biography of the protean American writer—beloved to readers for his poetry, many novellas, full-length novels, and essays that covered the gamut from food to fishing to foreign locales—will be published in hardcover, ebook, and as an audiobook on November 4, 2025. You can see the cover image from the advanced reading copy (ARC) that is being distributed to bookstores, book critics, and literary journalists, and the back cover copy.

Things are setting up very well for the book, with this enthusiastic blurb already received from the author and activist Rebecca Solnit, who writes that,

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all”— Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

The biography of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) unfolds across a number of key places, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, his home state, to the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village, to Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France. In the archives, Todd Goddard found a rich record of correspondence, including many letters with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane. Goddard is an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, has taught Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference.

We have some ARCs available, so let me know, if you or someone you know—a bookseller say, or a reviewer—wants one because of the sort of books they read, carry, and write about, including Harrison’s own poetry, essays, and novellas, the latter being a form he excelled at beyond any fiction writer of his era. 

This week, Harrison’s classic 1989 poetry collection, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, has been reissued in a new edition from his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press. In advance of that, Todd Goddard, Rebecca Solnit, and Jamie Harrison, one of Jim’s daughters, took part in an online discussion of the book with Copper Canyon publisher Joseph Bednarik. In addition, Copper Canyon printed a sweet little broadside for The Theory and Practice of Rivers, which I was delighted to receive in the mail, as shown in the photo gallery below. The republication of The Theory and Practice of Rivers is timely in that it happens to coincide with the publication this week of Is a River Alive?  by another of my favorite writers on nature and landscape, Robert Macfarlane. Taken together the two books are sure to bring renewed attention to our riverine world.

And if you’re looking to join an online community of folks who treasure Jim Harrison’s work, I suggest you can join the Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where I appreciate that this post is being widely shared.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the indomitable Jim Harrison!

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Stellar Reviews of “Dreams of the Romantics,” a Story Cycle by M. G. Turner

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September 9, 2025, latest update re: Dreams of the Romantics—

Dreams of the Romantics by M. G. Turner is available through online booksellers, such as Amazon.com, BN.com, and Bookshop.org, whose sales support independent bookstores.

A very keen reader, the horror writer Joseph Citro, author of such novels as The Gore—who is described on Wikipedia as a “Vermont author and folklorist who has extensively researched and documented the folklore, hauntings, ghost stories, paranormal activity and occult happenings of New England”—loved Dreams of the Romantics and posted a very favorable review of it on the book’s Amazon page and on his own Facebook page. His full comment is below, and he concludes with this:

“The prose is poetic, the themes philosophical, and the tales range from contemplative to supernatural. (See especially Dr. Polidori’s installment!) Just when you’re feeling comfortably immersed in early 19th-century prose, the author inserts an anachronistic word or turn of phrase that reminds you the issues explored are as relevant today as they were during that unforgettable Year Without a Summer. Overall, this is an original, thought-provoking, and fascinating read, something [Lord] Byron might have called a “ripping yarn!”
Two thumbs up; three if I had an extra!👍👍+👍”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 15, 2025, an update regarding Dreams of the Romantics:

The prominent editor of weird fiction, and critic, S. T. Joshi (known for American Supernatural Tales, Penguin Classics, and The Theory of the Weird Tale, Sarnath Press) reviewed the book and recommended it to his audience, writing:

“The occasion for this story cycle is the most famous literary contest in the history of weird fiction….Turner engages in the fantasy of being himself a member of the literary circle at the Villa Diodati, recounting his own Gothic tale….The final story in the book, “The Last Voyage,” is a gripping modern recreation of the fateful boat trip that led to Shelley’s drowning in the Bay of Spezia in 1822….Dreams of the Romantics is a vivid and engrossing little book….well worth reading by those many devotees of the weird who find themselves drawn back to that day, more than two centuries ago, when several towering literary figures sought to enshrine the weird into the corpus of English literature.”—S. T. Joshi, Spectral Realms No. 23 (Summer 2025)
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Post originally published April 8, 2025

Among the fortunate discoveries I made during COVID was that of a book reviewer in New Brunswick, Canada, James Fisher, who edits a book review journal called The Seaboard Review of Books, which can be found on Substack. Having long been interested in Canadian literature, and the curator of a blog I call Honourary Canadian, I appreciated that he and his team of critics focus on Canadian authors and small presses, and noticed that they also cover “international” titles. With that in mind, I contacted James and asked if he’d be interested in receiving a copy of Dreams of the Romantics, the chapbook inspired by the Romantic poets that Ewan Turner, my adult son and business partner, recently published under his pen name M. G. Turner. James was intrigued, so we shipped him a copy.

Yesterday, he published a lovely, thoughtful review of the book which I’m pleased to share here. Below are the closing paragraphs:

“Dreams of the Romantics  was a beautiful read. Turner’s use of language reflects the period, and I read through the book several times, picking up on different metaphors from the lives of all those in attendance at Lord Byron’s dinner party. I also found it educational, as I had only a passing knowledge of the Shelleys, little of Byron and none of Doctor John Polidori. Invariably, I was sent scrambling to the Internet for answers to my questions, as well as the biographies of the participants.

I certainly anticipate hearing more from the pen of M. G. Turner, as Dreams of the Romantics certainly demonstrated his potential as a writer.”

I invite you to read it in full by clicking on this link, or by opening the screenshots below.

Dreams of the Romantics is now available on Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.


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Chuffed to Hear “Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure” Praised Four Decades Later

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This hour-long youtube video offers a brilliant book conversation between Chicago writers Alex Kotlowitz, author of the 1992 classic social welfare book There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, and Donna Seaman, longtime editor of Booklist magazine, and author of the recent memoir River of Books: A Life in Reading, published by Ode Books, a cool imprint of Seminary Co-Op Bookshop and 57th Street Books devoted to books about books, bookselling, publishing, etc. Now that’s my kind of imprint!

At about the 25th minute of the video I was surprised and chuffed to hear Kotlowitz extol the nonfiction wilderness narrative Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, an engrossing wilderness narrative about an epic canoeing expedition in the Canadian north that the late esteemed editor Dan Frank acquired and published for Viking in 1986, which I then was honored to republish in 1997 as a Kodansha Globe title with a new Introduction by the late great Vermont novelist Howard Frank Mosher.

Alex Kotlowitz is right—Great Heart is a great book, and it was gratifying to learn it’s still being read and enjoyed nearly four decades years after it was first published, and nearly three decades after I brought it out again. #Canoeing #SurvivalStories

Here is the video of their conversation.

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On Sale Now: “Dreams of the Romantics,” a Story Cycle about the British Romantic Poets, by M. G. Turner

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As mentioned in the annual letter for Philip Turner Book Productions that we sent out a few weeks ago, Ewan will soon be publishing his first book, under his pen name M. G. Turner.  Titled Dreams of the Romantics , it’s a gothic story cycle about Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Dr. John William Polidori, who served as Byron’s physician.

The poetic circle gathered at Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland; it was June-July 1816, during the fateful Year Without a Summer, following the eruption of Mt Tambora near Bali which cast a pall over the earth. Mary Shelley, eighteen that year, later described “incessant rain” and “wet, ungenial” weather. Over one three-day stretch stuck indoors during inclement weather, Byron—who that same month would write his lacerating, apocalyptic poem “Darkness”—dared each of his friends to devise a gothic tale. His challenge resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Prometheus Reborn, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the first popular vampire story. Dreams of the Romantics will appeal to readers who have a yen for spooky stories, and an interest in or curiosity about the lives of these immortal writers.

The publisher, Riverside Press, is bringing out belles lettres titles. If you’d like to have a copy of Dreams of the Romantics, details are below.

  • The 96-page trade paperback, with seven stories imagining the lives of the British Romantic poets, sells for $15 + $5 shipping (maybe more for international destinations). If you want to buy a copy, please contact us at ptbookproductions[@]gmail[.]com and we will give you electronic payment information or our address
  • The painting on the front cover is “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
  • The painting on the back cover is “The Funeral of Shelley,” Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889
  • The Jenman symbol, seen on the back cover, traditionally symbolizes good fortune and wards off evil, as adopted by W. Somerset Maugham on his books.
  • In descending order the figures in the frontispiece shown here—opposite the titles of the stories—are Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, Dr. John William Polidori, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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The Tragedy of Bruno Schulz, A Mysterious and Captivating Writer by M. G. Turner

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Reading the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz is an experience like no other: scholars have compared him favorably to both Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. However, each of these authors provides only a partial analogy, despite Schulz’s work exhibiting the absurdity of the former and the nostalgia of the latter. But even with these similarities to existing storytellers, he is his own man, a wild, surreal magician of the written word who could conjure whole worlds right in his hometown of Drohobycz—then Poland, today Ukraine. In addition to being a linguistic marvel, he was also an accomplished illustrator of his own work, drawing bizarre phantasmagorical images which often featured a distorted version of himself.

Schulz is one of the few deceased writers I have ever felt creatively jealous of, for he achieved something on the page which is extremely elusive and usually relegated only to the medium of cinema: the ability to transmit surrealism into fiction. There are some technical reasons why fiction does not lend itself well to this style; in film, directors can move from image to image at will, while with words we must always be building and rounding out our world, as well as shoring up our grammar, and at the same time constantly keeping in mind the reader who may at any moment put the book down. However inexplicably, Schulz does both of these things—that is to say, building a world and transmitting surrealism—to powerful effect. He crafts confounding fables of a family in turmoil, of a son bewildered by his father, of a city where the rules of reality are supplanted by a magical dream logic that sweeps the characters and the reader into rollicking journeys of remarkable and sublime poignancy. And despite the inherent darkness of this world, in which it always seems to be night, it is truly a delight to go with him. Another literary feat he manages to accomplish is making the harsh realities of Jewish life in pre-war, and then war-torn Poland seem beautiful and in, its own way, holy. For there are no laments or complaints in his prose, or even dirges on suffering; rather, his work, in its own roundabout way, appears to be a celebration of the human imagination and its ability to influence and effect our lives in a palpable and entertaining fashion. Not to mention the fact that, like Kafka, his characters are not recognizably Jewish.

Still, the fact Schulz was Jewish—and later murdered by a jealous S.S. officer who resented his artistic endeavors, while walking home with a loaf of bread—does lend the work a feeling of impending doom. Like Kakfa, he is perpetually aware of his own perceived inadequacy and manages to fight this psychological oppression by saying in effect, “Okay, you’re right, I am hideous and inferior. But so are you, and more so—you are agents of darkness while I am only an agent of the strange.” This is my own rendering of what I take to be Schulz’s overarching idea and modus operandi. The world he permeates with strangers and drifters and birds and hats with a will of their own has no hue or whiff of evil to it; instead, confusion seems to be its main characteristic and echoes what he and his family must have been feeling at the height of the war when they’d been forced into the Drohobycz ghetto by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

The confusion present in his two story collections—the only ones that survive, as the rest of his literary output, including a novel called The Messiah, is lost to history—has a logical conclusion, and that is madness. A sense of madness was what Schulz must have been feeling as his family members were taken away, a sense of the vicious absurdity of trying to be an artist in a world that was crumbling around him. If it was driving the author mad, it made sense that the characters themselves are occupying a mad world where the laws of physics are suspended, or else don’t even apply. But in fiction, unlike in life, this kind of societal collapse can be rendered beautiful and even, to the reader, pleasurable to read—and all for its dream-like qualities which are born of the author’s escapist fancy and aesthetic brilliance. We enter a trance when reading Schulz, a healing type of meditative state, that even in the English translation by Celina Wieniewska (Schulz wrote in Polish) is distinct from the kind acquired from reading Kafka or Proust. This is due to the writer’s fusion of linguistic excellence with unbridled imagination that reveled in knowing no bounds—especially as his external world became increasingly cramped, closed-in, and imprisoning.

Schulz’s best story, I believe, is “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” a must-read for anyone interested in dream logic pushed to its most extreme. In this story the narrator’s father has died; yet he remains alive in only one location, a mysterious sanatorium where the rules of life and death go unenforced. Time is the key element here: in the sanatorium his father’s death simply has yet to occur, and it is here the narrator finds himself visiting the man whose antics have plagued him for many consecutive stories. Some scholars have pointed out the similarity of this theme to those of Franz Kafka whose issues with his own father were often on display in pieces like The Judgment, and of course The Metamorphosis. But instead of making us feel, as Kafka does, that the author is finding comparable metaphors in fiction for the most intense emotions in his own life, Schulz takes a more nebulous and, in many ways, more nuanced approach. There is simply no resolution in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” or really in any of his work. This mirrors the writer’s own death. As stated earlier, Schulz was shot down in the street at the age of fifty by an S.S. officer who did not appreciate Schulz’s artistic efforts—efforts he was lending to a rival Nazi commander who’d contracted his services to paint a mural of fairy tales on his children’s bedroom wall, in exchange for money and some degree of protection, which in the end did not save him. (This mural is now restored and on display in Israel’s Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.)

Perhaps Isaac Bashevis Singer said it best, when he lent a blurb to the publication of Schulz’s work, that had he “…been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” I could not agree more. I highly recommend delving into this mysterious and tragic author if dream logic, surrealism, and magical realism appeal to you—though he is so much more than any label, name, or genre, can stick to him. In life he defied convention, and in death he did the same; thus, his immortality as a mid-century European literary master, albeit one who died before their time, is unquestionably assured.

M. G. Turner

January 2025

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