Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections

Polish Wilno—now Vilnius, in Lithuania—was the city of Czeslaw Milosz's youth and adolescence. In this collection of essays and reminiscences, written over a span of three decades, the Nobel Prize–winning poet traces an informal autobiography against the street map of an extraordinary city—a crossroads of languages, cultures, and beliefs—that lies at the very heart of his internal geography.

Beginning with My Streets, available for the first time in paperback, gathers portraits of the writer...