y of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital. Beginning in 1911 with Boleslaw Prus' Apparitions, the collected stories provide a chronological account of the city's tumultuous and dramatic history. Each story captures a phase of Warsaw's past, through the interwar period as a Polish republic, the Second World War and the city's Nazi occupation, the post-war city in ruins and its rebuilding under the communist regime, and its new status as the capital of an independent Poland in 1989. With each story set in a specific part of the city, the collection becomes a guidebook to Warsaw's temporal, spatial, and psychological geography.

This collection features a wide variety of authors including Boleslaw Prus, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Ludwik Hering, Zofia Petersowa, Marek Hlasko, Kazimierz Orlos, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, Zbigniew Mentzel, Olga Tokarczuk, and Krzysztof Varga.