Poland as a State of Mind

Agnieszka Dale considers Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s new anthology “The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.”

By Agnieszka DaleAugust 24, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES, best known in the English-speaking world as Olga Tokarczuk’s long-term translator, has curated The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories (2025) not as a compulsory reading list but as an invitation to wander freely. The 39 stories collected in the anthology span over 100 years—and yet the collection never feels like a dutiful tour through a canon, or an immersion in what might stereotypically be labeled as “Polish.”

Rather than arranging the stories chronologically, Lloyd‑Jones groups them into nine playful, provocative sections—“Animals,” “Children,” “Couples,” “Men Behaving Badly,” “Women Behaving Badly,” “Misfits,” “Soldiers,” “Surrealists,” and, finally, “Survivors.” This arrangement shows that Polish literature is not so much conditioned by events as it has its own special way of recording them through humor, absurdity, and subversiveness. The groupings act like trail markers through a dense forest: you can plunge in anywhere, but the shape of the terrain gradually emerges. The range of the anthology is astonishing—not just in time but also in tone, perspective, narrative styles, and emotional registers—and it features such writers as Nobel laureate Tokarczuk; the luminous, underrated Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz; contemporary playwright and journalist Dorota Masłowska (who wrote her story “The Isles” especially for the collection); and the internationally celebrated science fiction author Stanisław Lem.

Each story is preceded by a short biographical note about the author, which is sometimes just as fascinating as the story itself. Many of these writers were born outside of Poland or former Polish territories, or have lived beyond its borders. In her introduction, Lloyd-Jones briefly outlines Poland’s political upheavals, only to quickly shift focus to what matters on the page: voice, form, emotional boldness. Her focus on reading for pleasure—so often overlooked in conversations about literature from “small” languages—sets the tone for the entire collection, serving to move beyond familiar clichés, such as the notion that Polish literature is solely preoccupied with war.

The book reads like a novel, so proceeding story by story, beginning with the historical timeline that explains Polish vulnerability, is key. As Lloyd-Jones explains:

Polish literature has often had to serve a national cause, and is frequently caught up in the machinery of political events. Once a large and powerful country stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, by the end of the eighteenth century Poland had been carved up by the neighbouring empires who took advantage of its fractures.

The opening “Animals” cluster sets the collection’s tonal range. Irena Krzywicka’s “Life and Love in the Hen House,” the first story, promises you will not be disappointed:

If you think that poultry lead boring, monotonous lives, entirely focused on their eventual ascension to the platter, surrounded by potatoes and spinach, and seasoned with dill—you’d be wrong. A fowl’s life is like any other life, full of fuss and bother, and romance, either ordinary or bizarre. That solemn moment of hatching from an egg, that moment at which a domestic bird exerts a strong effect on the human imagination, is quite unparalleled.

On one level, the story reads like a defense of the Polish language—its value, richness, and rightful place in literature and global discourse. It echoes Mikołaj Rej’s famous 16th-century declaration of linguistic pride: “Poles are not geese; they too have their own language.” But soon, complications arise—most notably, a duck’s bizarre and unsettling love for a rooster. The beautifully lyrical “Rysio the Cat” (the author, Paweł Sołtys, is also a singer and songwriter known by the stage name Pablopavo) is a perfect transitional story from animals to children: you don’t quite know if the dying grandfather who spends a lot of time talking to his grandson is really devoting time to his cat (“And he stroked my head or the cat’s, what’s the difference?”).

The adjacent section on children is not so much about innocence as parallel histories. Jan Parandowski, we are reminded, is best known in Polish literature for his retelling of the Greek and Roman myths. His story “The Phonograph” is full of beautiful noises and bangs: we discover that, while the words “bless you” might get recorded, the actual sneeze unfortunately does not. Joanna Rudniańska’s “Her Sovereign Decision” is a miniature fable about parenting done over social media and … hair clippings fed to birds. Next is Tokarczuk’s “The Green Children,” a strange blend of historical realism and fairy tale. Tokarczuk not only brings to light an overlooked part of Polish history but also challenges readers to rethink what we consider “natural” or “normal.” The narrator, William Davisson, is a real historical figure—a Scottish physician and botanist who served as court doctor to King John II Casimir of Poland. Not many short stories by Tokarczuk have found their way into the English translation, so this one is a real treat:

In this land, people live in trees and sleep in hollows. During the lunar day, they climb up to the very tops of the trees and expose their naked bodies to the moon, which turns their skin green. Thanks to this light, they do not need to eat much and are satisfied with forest berries, mushrooms, and nuts. […] When someone takes a liking to someone else, they stay with them a while, and when the feeling wears off, they leave and stay with someone else. This is where children come from. And when a child does appear, everyone is that child’s parents, and all are happy to take care of them.

“Moss,” by Julia Fiedorczuk, is another story centered on a preschool child’s bond with a grandparent—this time, a grandmother whose life quietly ends just as the child learns an important skill: how to dial a phone number. That small, practical knowledge becomes the means of alerting others to the grandmother’s final “sleep.” Dorota Masłowska—“a wild child of Polish literature,” according to Lloyd-Jones—closes this section. She is best known for her novel Snow White and Russian Red (2002), which was written when she was a teenager. “The Isles” is a promise of an idyllic tropical paradise on the other side of the loo.

In the “Couples” section, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s “The Passport Wife” is a decadent tale of Warsaw’s elite of the 1940s that connects a couple who are married to each other through their fake identities. In the “Men Behaving Badly” section, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s “A New Love,” with its exquisitely scented pink roses, captures the tremor before an illicit affair: a single bouquet fills a room with both promise and rot. But women can be bad too: Maria Kuncewiczowa’s 1926 story “Covenant with a Child” anticipates much later feminist writing by portraying motherhood as a negotiated contract, not a destiny. And while we worry that the relationship between mother and son will not be established, we are told it just takes time. The portrayals of motherhood’s struggles are both humorous and heartfelt.

No compendium of Polish fiction can ignore war, of course, yet Lloyd‑Jones wisely postpones the “Soldiers” section until later in the book. By the time we reach Marek Hłasko’s “The Soldier”—in which the narrator comes to understand that, even amid the everyday brutality of war, the land serves as both a resting place for the dead and a source of life—the reader has already encountered joy, absurdity, and erotic farce, making the post‑1945 desolation hit harder, but also with a greater sense of lyricism and an understanding of how we got here.

Finally, we are reminded that we can survive through surrealism. Bruno Schulz offers a tale of a father’s madness as reflected in the eyes of his formidable maid, Adela, a woman full of fire and unrealized passion. In Sławomir Mrożek’s “Last Words,” the narrator, a little-known writer, is pressured by powerful groups to shape a killer’s final words to serve their agenda. The story explores the writer’s inner conflict as he confronts the moral weight of crafting a message that will be heard around the world, highlighting the absurdity and responsibility of language in an age of mass media. The story, published in 1981, feels contemporary, like today’s news.

Lloyd‑Jones has fashioned a book that reads, improbably, like a single, many‑voiced novel. Its thematic architecture gives newcomers a compass while leaving seasoned Poland‑watchers ample room to wander. If you pick it up for Tokarczuk, stay for Iwaszkiewicz, Parandowski, Krzywicka, and the shockingly funny Masłowska. They will remind you that Poland, like all places, is less a dot on the map than a shifting state of mind.

It’s also worth noting that Lloyd-Jones is one of a dozen translators whose work is represented in the collection. Each is given a full biographical note, just like the primary authors, and they are in many ways the real heroes of this collection. Reading across the various categories, one begins to sense how humor, dream logic, and outright absurdity have become survival strategies in a country that has been repeatedly erased from the map and yet still stands strong, within the borders of its vast creativity.