My Father, the Crab

Bruno Schulz: renaissance man

As part of the New Yorker Fiction podcast: Nicole Krauss reads the Bruno Schulz story “Father’s Last Escape”.

Published posthumously in the New Yorker in 1978, this story by artist and writer Bruno Schulz resurrects his father (he described his work as biographical) perhaps for the last time. It was originally published as the final story of his second short story collection called The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass.

Schulz has been compared to Kafka because of their shared existentialist bent and their tendency toward the metamorphous character. But Schulz's work is filled with absurdist humor, he's much more funny than Franz ever was.