The Mountains of Parnassus (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) - Hardcover

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) was a Polish poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and diplomat of Polish and Lithuanian descent who defected to the West in 1951. Stanley Bill is lecturer in Polish studies at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge, UK.

“As accomplished as Milosz’s admirers would expect... They may be scraps, but as the cardinal argues, so is scripture. If art these days is an enterprise doomed to failure, as Milosz suggests, a trip to Parnassus in his company is still a stimulating outing, even if the gods and muses are in hiding.”—Andrew McKie, Spectator
“[Milosz’s] visionary, cryptic novel The Mountains of Parnassus reveals his reservations about the future of our species . . . These aphoristic, hallucinatory shards are the slightly mismatched contents of a time capsule sent to us in the present.”—Cynthia Haven, Times Literary Supplement 
“Miłosz’s futuristic landscape unsettles and captivates.”—Publishers Weekly
“A worthwhile work of speculative fiction . . . with some brilliant flashes . . . It remains worth seeking out.”—M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review
“An unre­lenting vision of a dystopian future . . . If we read The Mountains of Parnassus as an allegory, we begin to appreciate how truly whole and unwaver­ing Miłosz’s beliefs and ideas remained throughout the years . . . That the fragment we get ends with something that more than resembles a poem is salutary.”—Piotr Florczyk, World Literature Today
“The Mountains of Parnassus should be read as poetry . . . wander back through its sentences, and find how one after another deploys words with utter precision . . . [like] a series of speculative prose poems . . . The philosophical strength of The Mountains of Parnassus amplifies as it moves from one story to the next . . . Indeed, perhaps the entire novel proves better suited to the current moment than to the one it was born out of 45 years ago.”—Emma Schneider, Full Stop
“[This] novel . . . echoes a belief that can be found in almost all of [Milosz’s] poems and essays: History isn’t enough for us; to be fully realized, we need to imagine another realm in which the needs of the spirit are met.”—Steph Burt, Nation
“In particularly beguiling form The Mountains of Parnassus embraces many of Milosz’s preoccupations, most notably the fertile decadence of Western society and the role of faith struggling within it. Fragmentary and elliptical, Milosz's "science fiction novel that will never be written" offers a fascinating excursus into many of the poet's most pressing concerns, set forth in captivating prose.”—Mark Danner, author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

"This is a little jewel of science fiction-like musings on the difficulties of modern life. For a reader of Milosz's works, this is a splendidly recognizable book."—Irena Grudzinska Gross, Princeton University