Magdalena Tully is a famous Polish prose writer and translator. “Dreams and Stones” is one of the brilliant debuts of the 1990s. The history of a certain city (in which it is easy to recognize the features of Warsaw) is a dystopia, a story about an unsuccessful attempt to build a perfect world. According to the writer herself, “this book is not about the city, it is about life and death.” A grotesque rethinking of the facts of the 20th century gave a synthesis of parable and epic, anecdote and poem. There are no heroes in the book. But there are stones in which people try to embody their ideal of harmony, and dreams in which they try to hide from the surrounding chaos.