Bøger af Marek Bienczyk

In a beautifully illustrated story for adults that is playful, philosophical, and with a wink of naughtiness, two characters—the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear—consider the nature of happiness.Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question important to us all, from preschooler to pensioner: what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness to be found in the smallest, most visceral of experiences like eating a sugar-dusted donut? Can we truly experience happiness while there is suffering in the world? Is there a great cosmic balance that demands for every happy moment there also be a moment of sorrow? Can we be happy knowing that it’s a fleeting condition? Can we really know and understand happiness while we’re experiencing it? "Happiness is nothing but trouble,” says the Prince. For Prickly Pear, happiness simply tastes like a cupcake or profiterole.Writer Marek Bieńczyk, the winner of the Nike prize, the most important literature award in Poland, joins with the brilliant Polish illustrator Joanna Concejo whose detailed pencil drawings create a wonderland, where sitting at a café table morphs into a dreamscape with animals, a borderland between waking and dreaming.With a very light touch Prince in a Pastry Shop asks one of the most profound questions of our existence: is it enough to appreciate each moment of sweetness—and at what cost—or must we be active in an unforgiving world to find contentment.

In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their caretakers are hidden from the war just outside their iron gates. Our hero, Jurek, answers an ad in the paper for a job there and finds himself keeping the books alongside a knock-out strawberry blonde named Sonia.

Milan Kundera on Marek Bienczyk's "Transparency" "The subject of transparency has always interested me; in "The Art of the Novel" I discussed it as one of the key words in my personal lexicon. Marek Bienczyk is right to give it an entire book of its own: transparency remains one of the foundational concepts of today's social imaginary, and its role never ceases to grow. These lovely pages, in which the essay brushes up against fiction, offer us more than an historical and philosophical study, but a truly existential, and thus novelistic, investigation of transparency. It's a delight." Drawing on all his resources as a novelist, cultural critic, and scholar, Marek Bienczyk peels away the layers of our contemporary obsession with "transparency," skipping across centuries and continents to piece together the genesis of our fears of deception and overexposure. Highly poignant, and transcending the genres of criticism, personal essay, and the metaphysical novel, "Transparency" is a gorgeous revelation--about our never-ending need for revelation.