The Street of Crocodiles

A boy in a provincial Polish town watches his father dissolve into madness and metamorphosis, while the town itself shifts between the mundane and the mythic. Schulz’s first collection is one of the most original works of fiction in any language: half memoir, half hallucination, entirely unforgettable.

Why Start Here

The Street of Crocodiles (originally published as Cinnamon Shops) is Schulz’s masterpiece and one of the great short story collections of the twentieth century. The stories circle obsessively around a small cast: the narrator’s father (who breeds exotic birds, transforms into a crab, and opens a shop of impossible fabrics), the family servant Adela, and the provincial town of Drohobycz, which Schulz reimagines as a place where reality is always on the verge of dissolving into something richer and stranger.

The prose is unlike anything else: dense, sensory, incandescent. Schulz writes about wallpaper, dust, and weather as though they contain the secrets of the universe, and in his hands they do. Cynthia Ozick called him a “mythologizer of the ordinary,” and Philip Roth championed his work for decades. The Penguin edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer.

What to Expect

Short, densely written stories that reward slow reading. The prose is poetic and the imagery surreal. Some stories are linked, others stand alone. The emotional register runs from comic to elegiac. Best read a story or two at a time.