The street of crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz · first published 1963
71% recommend29% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Dreamlike, richly textured short stories set in a small provincial town, written in a meditative, lyrical prose style. It serves as a good starting point for Schulz and is a quick but absorbing read.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
This a magical book of short stories set in a small town in Poland during the period between the two World Wars. The writer, Bruno Schulz, wrote only two books in his lifetime but the two are so rich in vision that they contain a whole world. There are wonderful stories of childhood and how a child's imagination transforms the world; and there are more sombre tales with a sort of Kafkaesque feel to them. The author was also a graphic artist and illustrated his books with very high-quality etchings and lithographs that depict life in his town. As a curious aside, his books began as stories he t
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…of all you, but I'm like 2 stories in ("August" and "Visitation") and this is so Neutral Milk Hotel that I sort of assume Jeff Mangum stole all his lyrics from Schulz. To anyone else here: you can get Street of Crocodiles off the Internet Archive and it's a quick read (at least so far).
on “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History Review” ↗…Schulz is unexpected, even in these small numbers. I have 6 books¹ on the shelf above my bed. One is The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz reprint. I acquired it because I never resolved losing the copy of Street of Crocodiles that I carried around in my late teens and early twenties. Nothing else ever tweaked my perceptions like that did. ¹: Four are on my read list. The remaining book is The Secret Teaching of All Ages by…
on “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History Review” ↗I adore Schulz's works: dreamlike and touching. `Street of Crocodiles` is a great place to start.
on “Am I One of the Last Living Relatives of a Literary Legend?” ↗I took the last week and a half off work. I've been reading a great book - "Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz. After six years at the same company, I started realizing I might be ready for a move, but I'm not interview-ready, so I started brushing up on system design, python/leetcode stuff,…
on “Ask HN: How have you spent time outside work for the past couple of weeks?” ↗The only book. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.
on “Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?” ↗Also got sucked into Street of Crocodiles (Penguin Classics translation) due to dang's bio. My favorite story is Cinnamon Shops; a few minutes into reading it, and I'm relaxed, like a kind of meditation.
on “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History Review” ↗My freshman year of college I took a Polish literature seminar and I had to give a presentation on the Foucault and the body applied to a short story I hadn't read from The Street of Crocodiles. An important thought crashed into my head that froze me solid for about 30 seconds, "who the F cares?" I thanked the professor for her time, told her I was done with her class and I walked out. I dropped…
on “Foucault’s work on power” ↗…Franz Kafka, obviously, was born in Prague and spent his life in central Europe. Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937) is a Polish analogue from the same decade. Bruno Schulz's short story anthology The Street of Crocodiles is another one. After World War 2, you have people like Stanislaw Lem (Polish) writing a lot of farcical science fiction and Jan Svankmajer (Czech) making a lot of grotesque, farcical stop-motion animation.
on “Astronautilia” ↗For anybody else playing the home game like I am, this is an easier read than Bruno Schulz "Street Of Crocodiles". Later No, that's not quite fair; you get halfway into this and it starts to be written like the Hadiths. "The Bone People do not think about a thing but what it is an evil thought." I'm always saying!
on “"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" – A 40-year book-quest” ↗Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have fallen down on the job.
on “Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025” ↗