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Before Brezhnev Died
A collection of short stories from the Moldovan writer Iulian Ciocan, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth"--
An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
The cannibal has played a surprisingly important role in the history of thought--perhaps the ultimate symbol of savagery and degradation-- haunting the Western imagination since before the Age of Discovery, when Europeans first encountered genuine cannibals and related horrible stories of shipwrecked travelers eating each other. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is the first book to systematically examine the role of the cannibal in the arguments of philosophers, from the classical period to modern disputes about such wide-ranging issues as vegetarianism and the right to private property. Catalin Avramescu shows how the cannibal is, before anything else, a theoretical creature, one whos...
The Book of Whispers
A harrowing account of the Armenian Genocide documented through the stories of those who managed to survive and descendants who refuse to forget The grandchild of Armenians who escaped widespread massacres during the Ottoman Empire a century ago, Varujan Vosganian grew up in Romania hearing firsthand accounts of those who had witnessed horrific killings, burned villages, and massive deportations. In this moving chronicle of the Armenian people's almost unimaginable tragedy, the author transforms true events into a work of fiction firmly grounded in survivor testimonies and historical documentation. Across Syrian desert refugee camps, Russian tundra, and Romanian villages, the book chronicles individual lives destroyed by ideological and authoritarian oppression. But this novel tells an even wider human story. Evocative of all the great sufferings that afflicted the twentieth century--world wars, concentration camps, common graves, statelessness, and others--this book belongs to all peoples whose voices have been lost. Hailed for its documentary value and sensitive authenticity, Vosganian's work has become an international phenomenon.
Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare
In Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare, visionary modernist theatre director Aureliu Manea analyses the theatrical possibilities of Shakespeare. Through nineteen Shakespeare plays, Manea sketches the intellectual parameters, the visual languages, and the emotional worlds of imagined stage interpretations of each; these nineteen short essays are appended by his essay ‘Confessions,’ an autobiographical meditation on the nature of theatre and the role of the director. This captivating book which will be attractive to anyone interested in Shakespeare and modern theatre.
The Days of the King
A novel about the adventures of a dentist and the future king of Romania, set in nineteenth-century Bucharest.
La Belle Roumaine
La Belle Roumaine tells the story of Ana, a beautiful and bewitching Romanian woman. Shuttling between the capital cities of Europe, the novel follows Ana as she seduces café owners, philosophers, and wandering emigrants alike, each receiving a different version of her life story. To some, she’s a former nurse, to others, a former spy. To some she’s French and to others, Romanian. As each new layer of fabrication is added, the mystery of Ana and of what she’s running from grow apace.
Coming from an Off-Key Time
In the apocalyptic novel Coming from-Key Time, Bogdan Suceava satirizes events in his native Romania since the fateful end of the Ceauseseu regime in 1989. Using three interrelated narratives to illustrate the destructive power of Romanian society's most powerful mythologies, he depicts madness of all kinds---but especially religious beliefs and their perversion by outrageous seets. Here horror and humor reside impossibly in the same time and place, and readers experience the vertigo of living in the middle of a violent historical upheaval --
A Novel to Read on the Train
A director is trying to adapt a short story he once wrote for the screen. The story is about an isolated train station under threat by a giant eagle in a small town where rumors of war are rumbling. But the film shoot is plagued by accidents. The actors and crew don't understand the script. They argue over its meaning and perhaps come to identify with its subject matter a little too closely. Soon enough reality, such as it is, begins to crumble. Roman de Gare is a dreamlike and ominous novel by a great European writer--and the first novel he composed in French.
Living Tissue, 10x10
With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called "twitter revolution" of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Păun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.
I'm an Old Commie!
Emilia, a pensioner in northern Romania, is forced to confront the nostalgic illusions she nurtures as a reaction to the grim post-communist present when her daughter, now living in Canada, telephones urging her not to vote for the former communists in upcoming elections. Determined to discover in her own mind why 'things were better back then,' she explores her memories of growing up in an impoverished village and of her life as a factory worker in the town. But ironic tension grows as the reader glimpses between the lines how nothing was what it seemed in Ceaușescu's Romania. Interspersed among Emilia's memories are fantastical, hilarious anecdotes about the dictator, told by a factory foreman who will turn out to have been a secret police informer. I'm a Commie! is a subtle and humane novel about self-deception, but also about the ways in which a totalitarian state twisted ordinary lives.
