Exactly sixty years after the now-legendary Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892--1942) was murdered in his hometown, publication of Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait is a cause for literary celebration. In this seminal work, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on Schulz, reconstructs the enigmatic life story and evokes the fictional vision of this prodigiously gifted Polish Jew who first created erotic drawings and then c..omposed short fiction as utterly private expressions. So entranced were Schulz's first readers, friends in the Jewish intellectual circles of LwĂłw, that they brought his writing to the attention of a prominent Warsaw writer who had them published. With its deeply informed insight into the mythical and psychological layers of Schulz's extraordinary life story, Jerzy Ficowski's Regions of the Great Heresy is a much-awaited work of invaluable literary heritage and lays the groundwork to understanding the life and fiction of Bruno Schulz.'Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers....[His] verbal art strikes us -- stuns, even -- with its overload of beauty.' -- John Updike