Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.

Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character’s lyrical ode to the fate of his father’s perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher’s desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator’s excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.

The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.

A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist “thaw.” The narrator, Jerzyk (“little Jerzy”), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father’s closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, and would-be Polish insurrectionist. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Traba and the narrator’s father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka—assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme...

The Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released—a sober and, more or less, healthy man—after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.

While he's in rehab, Jerzy collects the stories of his fellow alcoholics—Don Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labor—in an effort to tell the universal, and particular, story of the alcoholic, and to discover the motivations and drives that underlie the alcoholic's behavior.

A simultaneously tragic, comic, and touching novel, The Mighty Angel displays Pilch’s caustic humor, ferocious intelligence, and unparalleled mastery of storytelling.