‘One of the great novelists of our century.’ 
- Milan Kundera

‘A master of verbal burlesque, a connoisseur of psychological blackmail, Gombrowicz is one of the profoundest of late moderns, with one of the lightest touches.’
- John Updike

‘Gombrowicz is one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century.... The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.’
- Susan Sontag

‘There are also novels of another genre, false novels like Gombrowicz’s, that are kinds of infernal machines.’
- Jean-Paul Sartre

‘What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent.’
- Bruno Schulz

‘Gombrowicz’s art cannot be measured with the passing of decades. It is a monument of Polish prose.’
- Czeslaw Milosz

‘Despite his anxiety about genre fiction, Gombrowicz acquits himself masterfully, moving deftly between horror, romance and crime. The web of dark motivations and interdependencies that links the characters is intricately and compellingly drawn, and the plot moves at an impressive speed…The novel’s shifts in tone and texture are handled expertly by translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who shows a keen sensitively not only to the language of the period but also to the genres being parodied, the translation interlaces passages of prose worthy of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and P G Wodehouse, expertly re-creating the original’s tonal palette for the anglophone reader.’
- Uilleam Blacker, Literary Review

‘Only Gombrowicz could turn a dirty yellow towel, hanging on a peg in the old castle kitchen, into a terrifying object…’
- Leonid Blimes, 3 AM Magazine

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69) is one of the twentieth century’s most enduring avant-garde writers. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and his remarkable Diary; and – after returning to Europe from Argentina in 1963 – was awarded the 1967 Prix Formentor/International for Cosmos.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize.

Adam Thirlwell is the author of four novels. His work has been translated into thirty languages, while his awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.