I found this copy in the shelves of my old room at my parent's house. From the cover, which looks like a couple of kids, one of whom isn't wearing a shirt, possibly isn't wearing any pants, either, watching a bunch of turkeys, I thought, "Sure, why not?" figuring the odd cover a harbinger of odd stories inside.

The introduction tells you, right up front, that these stories, this Polish fantasy, is chiefly, if not exclusively, about the Devil, in all his forms. And in the intro the translator and editor Wiesiek Powaga compares one of the stories to Flann O'Brien's *The Third Policeman*, and I'm always a sucker for a Flann O'Brien comparison.

The collection starts off so well, too. "Co-Existence" by Slawomir Mrozek is a great funny little story about the devil coming to visit a vicar. On the merit of this story, alone, I took the book back with me and dove in. It's not the only good, if not great story, but there certainly a lot of stories that drag. I really enjoyed Marek S. Hyberath's "The Greater Punishment," Stefan Grabinski's "The Grey Room," Kornel Makuszynski's "The Gentleman with a Goatee," "The Legs of Isolda Morgan" by Bruno Jasienski, "The White Worms" by Wiktor Woroszylski, and "Dragon" by Andrzej Bursa.

They offered good, crisp story telling and funny little twists on some familiar themes of love, longing, and punishment. Where some of the other stories didn't do it for me (like "Dinner at Countess Kotlubay's by Witold Combrowicz) they seemed like stories which could have been told by anyone, and didn't necessarily have an interesting Polish twist or too much in the way of originality. Where the editor raved about the vision of "The Golden Galley," the final story in the collection, I found it a bit boring, overly enamored with its own vision of the future/alternate universe.
So you'll certainly find some gems in here, but you'll also find yourself bogged down in some fairly pedestrian stories (NB. this isn't _The Best of Polish Fantasy_, it's _The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy_ for a reason), like a deal with the devil where maybe the more ineffective stories are like penance for the brilliant ones. ( )