The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (1934)

The cinnamon shops give the book its first, truer name, those dim spice-scented stores a boy slips into on a winter errand, their back rooms opening onto streets the daylight town never held. That is the world Bruno Schulz built across thirteen linked stories, and it runs on one outrageous premise: matter is alive and restless, scheming toward shapes of its own, so that wallpaper breathes and a whole room can ripen and rot like fruit. At its centre stands the father, who raises exotic birds in the attic, delivers grave treatises to the tailors' dummies, and by degrees unmakes himself into a bird, a cockroach, a thing the household stops naming. Read one paragraph and the prose runs a fever, lush and lit from within, every clause crowded with another image. Schulz painted as well as wrote, and in 1942 a Gestapo officer shot him dead on a street in Drohobycz, the ordinary town beneath the enchanted one. He left two slim books and the rumour of a lost third, and they glow like nothing else in the language.