Press committed to publishing new editions of the Polish novelist Zofia Nalkowska (1884-1954), beginning with Ursula Phillips' translation of Choucas (1927; 2014), the few readers in the English-speaking world familiar with her work were almost certain to have stumbled across it by one of two inauspicious routes. First, admirers of Bruno Schulz may recall that it was Nalkowska who arranged for the publication of his first book, the extraordinary collection of stories Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon

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... Shops, 1933). 1 Second, students of the Holocaust may be familiar with her slender book of reflections on Nazi atrocities, Medaliony (Medallions, 1946), misleadingly presented as journalism and, until recently, the only of her books in English translation still in print. 2 These faint forays into the Anglophone consciousness-the professional (and, according to some sources, sexual) footnote to the life of a male author; the modest contribution to postwar reflections on the fate of Poland's Jews-provide a distorted, diminished portrait of one of the most surprising and influential voices in viii FOREWORD