Needle's Eye

“Like Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier or Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, Wiesław Myśliwski’s narrator reminiscing is triggered by trauma. Old age revives the need to bring closure to his unfulfilled first love and sends him into a dizzying pollarding of memory that turns Needle’s Eye into a masterful phenomenology of introspection.” —Alice Catherine Carl, World Literature Today

“History and personal experience converge in this evocative, layered exploration of the workings of memory—both collective and individual.” —Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times’ “Best books of 2025”

“Myśliwski’s reluctance to name his protagonists creates an omniscient, impersonal narrative that sweeps readers along, at times uncertain of the who or the when, but savoring the flurry of memories … Timelines are layered like an Escher painting, linking beginnings and ends, expressing both the unity and continuity of nature.” —Brock Covington, The Active Mind

“The labyrinthine latest by Myśliwski reckons with mortality and Polish history … Unfolding in an eloquent and slow-moving monologue, the novel sustains an intimate mood … Fans of modernist fiction will find much to admire.” —Publishers Weekly

Wiesław Myśliwski is the only writer to have twice received the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award: in 1997 for his novel Horizon and again in 2007 for A Treatise on Shelling Beans. He worked as an editor at the People’s Publishing Cooperative and at the magazines Regiony and Sycyna. In addition to the Nike Prize, Myśliwski has received the Stanisław Pietak Prize, the Arts Ministry Prize, the State Prize, the Reymont Prize, the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, and the Golden Sceptre Award.

Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman and The Mighty Angel; Stefan Żeromski’s The Faithful River; and Fado and Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Różewicz’s new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone.

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