Andrzej Stasiuk

"A group of friends, young men in their early thirties, take up the challenge of roughing it in the mountains of South East Poland. Up against nature, they hope to break the monotony of their everyday lives and discover once more their childhood years." "But a gratuitious act of murder committed by one of the group forces them to go on the run. As they flee through the blizzard, their attempt to return to past values of solidarity slides away. Now it is every man for himself in a desperate flight through the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.

"When a brutal felon on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list turns up dead in Los Angeles County, few mourn him; in fact, the public begins to cheer his unknown assailants as heroes. But as more brutalized corpses of fugitive outlaws are found, Sheriff's Homicide Detective Alex Brandon knows that the vigilante group the public has nicknamed 'The Exterminators' may be far more ruthless and sadistic than its victims. The corpses bear eerie similarities to victims of a serial killer investigated by Brandon ten years ago. The perpetrator died at the hands of his own deeply traumatized teenaged stepson, Kit Logan. Logan, protected by his wealthy family, never spent a day in jail; instead, he was sent to a private reform school for the truant sons of L.A.'s most affluent. Alex Brandon, unable to locate Logan for questioning, has a chilling sense he is being manipulated. But why?" --

"Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," Stasiuk tells us, "beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna." Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi--loose wires hanging from the dashboard--by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque--Byzantine--Tatar--Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, "simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky." A brilliant tour of Europe's dark underside--travel writing at its very best"-- "A collection of travel narratives from Central and Eastern Europe by award-winning Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk"--