Writers No One Reads • Stefan Grabinski (1887–1936)—“the Polish Poe”

Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company.

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50 Watts (WS)
Invisible Stories (SS)
(un)justly (un)read (JS)

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Stefan Grabinski (1887–1936)—“the Polish Poe”—has been picking up fans since China Miéville’s 2003 Guardian article bemoaning the lack of translations of his work. Miéville wrote that

…reading The Dark Domain by Stephan Grabinski is such a revelatory experience. Because here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity—in electricity, fire-stations, trains: the uncanny as the bad conscience of today.

I first read about Grabinski in Gilbert Alter-Gilbert’s long review of Dark Domain in Asylum Annual 1995 (probably my first exposure to Alter-Gilbert too!):

Again and again, these stories attain a crescendo of sustained hysteria, while, for their invocation of primordial powers, their penetrating psychological insights, and their brooding, misanthropic pessimism, one might liken the ensuing effect to sitting in the company of Madame Blavatsky, escorted by Arthur Machen and Guy de Maupassant, and chaperoned by Arthur Schopenhauer, screaming at the top of their lungs on a runaway roller coaster.

In English:

—The Dark Domain (11 stories)
—The Motion Demon (Ash-Tree cloth bound or $7.99 ebook)
—In Sarah’s House

Translator Miroslaw Lipinski is working on two more story collections.

Links:

—website devoted to Grabinski
—Facebook page
—short wikipedia entry