Landless Boys

Author: Jerzy Jarniewicz

Translator: Piotr Florczyk

Publisher: Mad Hat Press (2023)

In Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Landless Boys—which comes to us through Piotr Florczyk’s wonderful English translation—sacrilege and the sacred repeatedly weave through each other. Sex and eros are neither romanticized nor profaned, but simply—and inexorably—present. Grand-scale human thinking becomes diminished by its proximity to daily activity, and private lives exist quietly inside the machinery of history and civilization. By the end, this ambitious, brilliant, understated book has offered an astonishingly broad depiction of human experience—inside of which the individual mind is forever navigating the inescapability of both the body and the present moment. 

—Wayne Miller