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The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz (1934)

A Polish town becomes a Jewish writer’s madeleine

by
Jason Diamond
September 17, 2013

Proustian recollection filtered through the Kafkaesque, that reads like a proto-David Lynch screenplay: A book like The Street of Crocodiles needs those points of comparison for the uninitiated. Bruno Schulz’s eerie collection of stories, originally published in 1934, is a portrait of a family and town that resembled his own youth in Poland and is unlike anything you’ve read before.

Jason Diamond is the literary editor of Flavorwire and founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His Twitter feed is @imjasondiamond.