Czesław Miłosz

Collects five decades of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, covering topics including war, human nature, faith, communism, and Polish culture.

Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictons of nature in this severe northern setting and the sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with...