Books like Zły by Tyrmand Leopold

"A Del Rey book." It was bad enough when Lije Baley, a simple plainclothes cop, was ordered to solve a totally baffling mystery - the murder of a prominent Spacer. It was worse when he found that the smug, self-satisfied Spacers were behind the pressure to provide an impossibly quick solution. But then Lije discovered the worst of all bad news. The Spacers, distrusting all Earthmen, insisted he must work with an investigator of their choice. And that investigator turned out to be R. Daneel Olivaw. R stood for robot--and Lije hated and feared robots deeply, bitterly and pathologically. Issac Asimov's The Naked Sun and The Caves of Steel are two of the most famous science-fiction novels ever. They are set long after mankind - aided by the positronic robot - has colonized the worlds of other suns. This is a time of growing concern between Earthmen and Spacers. Lije Baley, who is filled with all Earths prejudice agains robots and Spacers, must learn to work together with a seemingly human robot to solve apparently impossible crimes that threaten the fragile link between Earth and Space.

A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."

This a magical book of short stories set in a small town in Poland during the period between the two World Wars. The writer, Bruno Schulz, wrote only two books in his lifetime but the two are so rich in vision that they contain a whole world. There are wonderful stories of childhood and how a child's imagination transforms the world; and there are more sombre tales with a sort of Kafkaesque feel to them. The author was also a graphic artist and illustrated his books with very high-quality etchings and lithographs that depict life in his town. As a curious aside, his books began as stories he told in the margins of letters he wrote to a friend. She encouraged him to expand on these little tales and the results were truly beautiful. In short, Bruno Schulz is one of the best little-known writers (little known in North America, that is, because I think he is more acknowledged in Europe)