Featuring 20th-century writers, including Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, as well as celebrated poet Zbigniew Herbert and internationally renowned Bruno Schulz, this collection captures the brilliance and originality of a literary culture rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These writers are branded by the political realities of their country -- creating literature out of the brutality of the World War II, under the numbing and inhibiting Communist reign, and finally within a free society, but one freighted with the weight of its history.