Bruno Schulz's Stories - translated by John Curran Davis (I like these much better than the published translations)

"THE YELLOW and thoroughly boring days of winter had come. An outworn and tattered, too-short mantle of snow lay on the russet hued earth. It did not stretch far enough for many of the roofs, which stood black or rust coloured, shingled, thatches and arks concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them—black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, purlins and joists—the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, scoured by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney sweeps could never drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church—they took flight again, flapping, finally to cling each to its own place on its own branch—but at daybreak they would take to the air in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. Like last year’s bread loaves, the days hardened in the cold and the boredom. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness..."

The Art of Bruno Schulz (a flash site)

from the Giornale Nuovo archive

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 1.

YouTube - Brothers Quay: Street of Crocodiles part 2