Maria Kuncewicz (in Polish, Kuncewiczowa) was one of the most engaging Polish writers of the twentieth century. In the late 1970s she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, although her reputation has remained more prominent in Poland than internationally. She lived through some of the most profound upheavals of the modern and postmodern period: she came of age when Poland regained independence in 1918; when the German army invaded Poland in September 1939 she went into exile, first in Western Europe and then in the United States; and she returned to her home country in the 1960s as an American citizen. Her works span such genres as the short story, novel, travel notebook, autobiography, radio serial, play, and essay. In their perceptive and subtle treatment of twentieth-century anxieties, her writings can be seen as ahead of their time, especially in their focus on subjects that late-twentieth-century literary critics...