Hi,

Only a short newsletter this week - my laptop has mostly been commandeered by my sick son for emergency Peppa Pig marathons.

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Official poster for the Toruń exhibition

I'm very happy to announce that a promotional poster has become available for the Marek Zulawski exhibition next month! And it seems the dates are finally final:

If you need a Google Maps pin to the exhibition venue, click here. I can thoroughly recommend Toruń as a tourist destination any time of year - most of the old town is a UNESCO heritage site.

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Book recommendation of the week

While my son was watching Peppa this week in his delirium, I managed to read a short novel by China Miéville called The City & The City. It's a gritty murder mystery set in two cities that take up the same geographical space.

The reason I'm recommending it here in a Polish-British newsletter is that one of the main influences was the Polish Jewish artist-author Bruno Schulz.

Schulz's strange magical writings about small-town life make you feel like there's a hidden world in the everyday, and that was a big influence on Miéville. He even opens the book with a Schulz quote from Cinnamon Shops:

‘Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets.’

The Miéville book is a great page-turner with a unique twist on the classic detective genre. But if you don't feel like reading it, you could track down the BBC mini-series based on it, which I haven't watched, but seems good fun and certainly conveys the subtext.

You should watch the short clip above, at the very least, as it explains the concept of two cities being in the same place. Amusingly, they show footage of Warsaw when they mention one of the cities (the skyscrapers west of the Palace of Culture).

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That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. August already, huh?

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Other stuff

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