Among the impressive number of good young authors in Poland, Wojciech Kuczok stands out as an exceptional stylist. With his sensitivity to the finest cracks that herald the collapse of an entire life, he seems predestined for the elemental themes: love, sexuality, death. "In the Circle of Ghosts," his latest collection of prose consisting of five long stories and four brief "interludes," each titled after one of the four preludes from Chopin's op. 28, tells the stories of people on the threshold. The businessman who discovers his homosexuality while grotesquely harassed by a beggar on a park bench; the psychoanalyst who faces the loaded gun of a deranged patient; the widow who one day can no longer find her husband's grave - all of them tip over in a moment of blinding realization, stepping out of their everyday lives and losing themselves. Like the young.