The Painted Bird.
"It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself": First Edition of The Painted Bird; Inscribed by Jerzy Kosinski
The Painted Bird.
KOSINSKI, Jerzy.
$800.00
Item Number: 4491
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
First edition. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed on the half title page, “with every best wish, cordially, Jerzy Kosinski Sept. 1975.” Fine in a very good dust jacket with a few small chips to the spine.
The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski's story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing excess where senseless violence and untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski's novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today's society than it was upon its original publication. "A powerful blow on the mind because it is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact" (Arthur Miller).
