Zagajewski expresses his thoughts on politics and art and the tensions between them in his collection of essays Solidarity, Solitude (1990), translated by Lillian Vallee.

Like Mysticism for Beginners, Zagajewski's 1985 collection of poetry, Tremor, translated by Renata Gorczynski, focuses on the intersection of public and private worlds.

Timothy Garton Ash's The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (2002) presents an absorbing, eyewitness chronicle of the 1980 Polish workers' rebellion against the Communist-controlled government and of the development of the Solidarity movement.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (1993), by Gale Stokes, is a comparative study of the pressures that led to the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Many of the poems in Czeslaw Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (2003) focus on themes similar to those in Zagajewski's poetry, including exile and alienation. Milosz, a Nobel Prize...