Muse & Messiah is the first full comparative study of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), based on the latest materials, including new interviews with ex-students and biographers, Polish texts, plus all worldwide English studies and influenced works. Rare photographs, detailed chronology, and recent images are included for comparison.

Schulz's life and themes are examined with detailed Polish and European influences. New, first-hand corrected information about his home region adds a new dimension to his creative world within contemporary Polish-Jewish tensions. Controversial international debates about his last works are brought up to date in a work that seeks to place his poetic-artistic achievement more centrally to highlight an original, modernist and yet universal vision.

“An interdisciplinary study of dazzling scholarship, Muse & Messiah, with its wide-ranging references, allusions, associations, and citations is a true compendium of learning and speculation. By placing Schulz in the many different contexts that shaped his life and work Banks is able to find links, parallels, analogues and interconnections that are often unexpected and surprising, and always rich in complex meaning. Yet, as Banks argues in his horizon-broadening interpretation, Schulz cannot be confined to any set of contexts, and, like Blake and Yeats, is ultimately a poet who exists in his own self-created mythic world”.   – Professor Daniel  Gerould, The Graduate Center, CUNY

“Fans of lost Mitteleuropa, take note: InkerMen Press continues its Hoffmannesque list with an ambitious study of Bruno Schulz's life and work that teases out some universal literary threads from the Polish Jewish writer's private and idiosyncratic cosmos”.   – Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets

“Brian Banks, in his new book, shows us a Bruno Schulz that was not known before. He reveals the unknown details of the writer's life with a true detective's passion. The rare ability of detailed interpretation and the author's erudition let us discover the mystery of Schulz's hermetic fiction. It will be enjoyed both by Schulz's devoted readers and by those who have yet to encounter his work”. – Tomasz Mackiewicz, Warsaw University

Brian R. Banks began writing as a prelude to living on the London streets, in the Francis Thompson rather than Orwellian mode. Following a five-year study of Joris-Karl Huysmans at the British Museum, and the publication of occasional articles, reviews and two private poetry collections, Banks edited The Image of J.-K. Huysmans (1990), in which appears his article, Joris-Karl Huysmans 1848-1907: Critical Essay, providing a survey of Huysmans's fiction written during his Naturalist, Decadent, and Catholic phases. This period coincided with Banks finding his true muse and running a bookshop. A few years later he wrote Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz, in tandem with a book of essays. The author currently lives somewhere in Central Europe.

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