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Polish
Archipelago Books
02 December 2025
A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory

A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory

In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings- the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war-and fragments of a home's sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.

Wiesław Mysliwski's latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Mysliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle's Eye is both a writer's farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.
By:   ,
Imprint:   Archipelago Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 191mm,  Width: 152mm, 
Weight:   369g
ISBN:   9781962770392
ISBN 10:   1962770397
Pages:   300
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Wiesław Mysliwski is the only writer to have twice received the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award- in 1997 for his novel Horizon and again in 2007 for A Treatise on Shelling Beans. He worked as an editor at the People's Publishing Cooperative and at the magazines Regiony and Sycyna. In addition to the Nike Prize, Mysliwski has received the Stanisław Pietak Prize, the Arts Ministry Prize, the State Prize, the Reymont Prize, the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, and the Golden Sceptre Award. Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli's Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman and The Mighty Angel; Stefan _x017B_eromski's The Faithful River; and Fado and Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz's new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award for Mysliwski's Stone Upon Stone.

Reviews for Needle's Eye

""Like Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier or Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, Wiesław Myśliwski’s narrator reminiscing is triggered by trauma. Old age revives the need to bring closure to his unfulfilled first love and sends him into a dizzying pollarding of memory that turns Needle’s Eye into a masterful phenomenology of introspection."" —Alice Catherine Carl, World Literature Today ""History and personal experience converge in this evocative, layered exploration of the workings of memory—both collective and individual."" —Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times' ""Best books of 2025"" ""Myśliwski's reluctance to name his protagonists creates an omniscient, impersonal narrative that sweeps readers along, at times uncertain of the who or the when, but savoring the flurry of memories . . . Timelines are layered like an Escher painting, linking beginnings and ends, expressing both the unity and continuity of nature."" —Brock Covington, The Active Mind ""The labyrinthine latest by Myśliwski reckons with mortality and Polish history . . . Unfolding in an eloquent and slow-moving monologue, the novel sustains an intimate mood . . . Fans of modernist fiction will find much to admire."" —Publishers Weekly


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