'For the many readers worldwide drawn to the work of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, Brian Banks’ Muse & Messiah offers a fresh and innovative approach to understanding the mysteries of Schulz’s “Life, Imagination, and Legacy.”   

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 – his home town of Drohobycz and the region, Poland of the 1930s and its intellectual climate, the Polish writers with whom he had close affinities and allegiances (Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz), and the broader European perspectives and foreign authors he admired (Mann, Rilke, and Kafka) – Banks is able to find links, parallels, analogues and interconnections that are often unexpected and surprising, and always rich in complex meaning.

Yet, 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 author's erudition lets us discover the mystery of Schulz's hermetic fiction. At the same time Muse and Messiah is an easy-reading book free from academic jargon. It will be enjoyed by both devoted Schulz's readers and those who have yet to encounter his work. This book will be a great source of information for everyone interested in the life and work of the author of Cinnamon shops.’