"An idyll of immense charm and poetic depth...It takes a masterpiece to reveal the sheer unreality of our modern creative modes and poses, and Milosz's novel is such a masterpiece."--John Bayley, "The New York Review of Books""Not only an impressive but an immediately appealing novel..."The Issa Valley "has the sensuousness and immediacy one associates with novels apparently inspired by the writer's own childhood recollections: "David Copperfield "and "The Mill on the Floss "come to mind."--Michael Irwin, "The Times Literary Supplement""Nothing rings false in this poetic and realistic tale. Even the scenes that...belong to another time and place will hold your attention to the end."--Elie Wiesel, "Chicago Tribune""A lyrical account of a rural boyhood, dominated by family, nature and village life...One is constantly aware of being in the hands of a master--of a talent that is original, unhurried, almost serene...He is a remarkable writer."--Larry McMurtry, "The Washington Star""Superficially, "The Issa Valley" is a boyhood novel of discovery, a kind of "Huckleberry Finn" if the latter had been written by a poet/lover. But for the adult narrator, it is an act of self-recovery preceded by, and indeed contingent upon, a recovery of the world, in as unmediated a manner as it is possible to do and still remain within the power of language to describe. That is, it is a recovery of the the "poetic "self."--Louis Iribarne, "World Literature Today"

Czeslaw Milosz is the winner of the 1978 Neustadt International Prize in Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 1962 he has been a professor, now emeritus, of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent publications are "Facing the River," "Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz," and "Road-side Dog." He lives in Berkeley, California, and Krakow, Poland.