An omen that changes people, a story about how good and evil can happen at once, about the simple ones, who don't distinguish right from left, and about the complicated ones, who think they are chosen by God. This is a novel about fathers and clever daughters, who do not let the story die. A book where love comes uninvited, as it always has done, full of suspense, and our undying desire to find purpose in this life. Drawing on the Biblical story of Jonah, the author brings to life a whole village of characters as well as the monsters of the deep, invigorating our imagination in the process.

Nadia Comaneci is the Romanian child prodigy and global gymnastics star who ultimately fled her homeland and the brutal oppression of a communist regime. At the age of just 14, Nadia became the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games and went on to collect three gold medals in performances which influenced the sport for generations to come, cementing Nadia's place as a sporting legend. However, as the communist authorities in Romania sought an iron grip over its highest-profile athletes, Nadia and her trainers were subjected to surveillance from the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Drawing on 25,000 secret police archive pages, countless secret service intelligence documents, and numerous wiretap recordings, this book tells the compelling story of Nadia's life and career using unique insights from the communist dictatorship which monitored her. Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police explores Nadia's complex and combustible relationship with her sometimes abusive coaches, Bela and Marta Karolyi, figures who would later become embroiled in the USA Gymnastics scandal. The book addresses Nadia's mental struggles and 1978 suicide attempt, and her remarkable resurgence to gold at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. It explores the impact of Nadia's subsequent withdrawal from international activity and reflects on burning questions surrounding the heart-stopping, border-hopping defection to the United States that she successfully undertook in November 1989. Was the defection organised by CIA agents? Was it arranged on the orders of President George Bush himself? Or was Nadia aided and abetted by some of the very Securitate officers who were meant to be watching the communist world's most lauded sporting icon? What is revealed is a thrilling tale of endurance and escape, in which one of the world's greatest gymnasts risked everything for freedom.

Once again, the extraordinary storyteller, Ludovic Bruckstein, opens the door onto a lost world of Jewish history and lore in the central European Carpathian region, now parts of Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. Invoking the tales of a great maggid – a wandering storyteller within the East-European tradition of Hassidism - he weaves tales of wisdom and mystery which linger inside us long after the story has ended. Bruckstein's previous titles (The Trap, 2019 and With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, 2021) have gained him a growing audience of dedicated readers in the English-speaking world, where his work has been too-long absent. This edition comes complete with a fascinating glossary of terms and historical references complied by the translator.

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.

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 time is the twilight of the decrepit Brezhnev regime, the place, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia: the "Latin periphery of empire." A pensioner seeks justice for his dead wife, crushed by a falling crane--the very symbol of the "construction of socialism"--but comes up against hostility from a cynical system at best indifferent, at worst contemptuous of human life. With a keen, Gogolian eye for the grotesque, often squalid, details of everyday life in the USSR, Iulian Ciocan paints darkly humorous but compassionate portraits of Homo sovieticus, from crusty war veterans and lowly collective farm workers to venal Party bigwigs, as each comes to the disturbing realization that the lofty ideals of Soviet society were lies all along. And for idealistic young pioneer Iulian, the biggest disillusionment of all will be the abrupt revelation of Brezhnev's mortality.

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The novel covers the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the different characters. We might, in fact, say that it is we who inhabit their future. And so too does Dan Cretu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world, but one still very much alive in our hearts.

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 cafe 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.

In the late-1960s Romania, during the relative cultural thaw of the post-Stalinist period, Dumitru Tsepeneag emerged as an innovative writer of short prose and the pioneer of oneirism, a subversive theory and practice of literature that challenged not only socialist realism in particular but realism in general. By the early 1970s, following a cultural crackdown by the totalitarian state, oneirism had been banned and Tsepeneag was forced into exile in France. Short Prose, Volume 1, collects the three volumes of short stories that Tsepeneag published in Romania before going into exile: Exercises (1966), Cold (1967), and Waiting (1971), along with previously unpublished shorter texts from the same period.

A village in the Carpathian Mountains, one of the last outposts of pre-modernity, an elderly man, sensing his time is short, tells his young grandchildren tales that weave a family saga covering the real history from the 1870s to the time of the telling. One of the children, now grown, is the re-teller of these tales, while the other, Miruna, perhaps has the gift of second sight. Incorporating elements of fantasy common to the storytelling traditions of the Balkans, historical characters mix with imaginary beings in a landscape that recreates the world of an isolated village bearing an unusual name: Evil Vale. Ancestors are talked about as if ancient heroes, and the novel shifts focus between telling about their lives and the storyteller's own experiences through the prism of the village during both world wars. As past tragedies are presented in a way that the grandchildren might picture and remember them, the novel has been called a kind of meta-fairy tale, a story about the lost tradition of oral storytelling itself, the conveyance of a family history from one generation to the next via the spoken word. With the death of the grandfather, the children realize that confronted with the ubiquitous hand of modernity, which the village has managed to frustrate over a succession of regimes, a whole world of stories and the entire memory of a family and of its idiosyncratic way of life in the village might have been irrevocably lost. Blending the autobiographical and historical with the marvelous, Miruna, a Tale is a novel whose core is the exploration of the imaginary themes and motives that informed traditional society in the mountainous regions of Romania, a world that was radically transformed into virtual extinction over the course of the 20th century. Described by one critic as a "literary jewel whose strange and singular spell holds the reader in its thrall," Miruna, a Tale received the Bucharest Writers Association Fiction Award in 2007.

The stories in this collection are stories of the lives and struggles of a wonderful variety of characters living in the Maramures region, in the years leading up to a war that will suddenly and irretrievably destroy the pattern of their existence. The eerily shocking ending of many of these stories is the moment their protagonists climb on the cattle trains to be transported to Auschwitz; while leaving the tale of their often tragic fate unstated. Bruckstein's works, novels, stories and plays, deal with the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic, lives of simple people whose fate is controlled by highly unpredictable forces. These he describes with understanding, compassion and forgiveness; smiling at the petty worries and trivialities that people take so seriously, while often remaining unaware of very real and existential dangers. He belongs to a generation so well described by the writer Czeslaw Milosz, in his book, The Captive Mind: "Few inhabitants of the Baltic States, Poland or Czechoslovakia, of Hungary or Romania, could summarize in a few words the story of their existence. Their lives have been complicated by the course of historic events".

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-Pa un 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.

Alistair Ian Blyth's Card Catalogue is a book about books. Set in Bucharest in the decade after the Revolution, it presents a series of dreamlike narratives loosely linked by the subject of libraries: book hoarding, book hunting, book burning, and, above all, the dreams of infinite other books-past and future-that every individual codex volume inspires. Whether he is describing his encounters with Gribski (whose strange hidden library in Bucharest he is to see but once) or itemizing the various books whose existence he has dreamed (including "a collection of children's paeans to Ceausescu bound in the same volume as a slim commentary on Pound's Canto XIV"), Blyth shows himself to be a card catalogue unto himself. In the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Alberto Manguel, this book is bound to please.

It wasn't until after Dumitru Tsepeneag fled Romania for France in 1971 that he was able to speak frankly about the literary movement that he had helped create.

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 whose fate sheds light on the decline of theories of natural law, the emergence of modernity, and contemporary notions about good and evil. This provocative history of ideas traces the cannibal's appearance throughout Western thought, first as a creature springing from the menagerie of natural law, later as a diabolical retort to theological dogmas about the resurrection of the body, and finally to present-day social, ethical, and political debates in which the cannibal is viewed through the lens of anthropology or invoked in the service of moral relativism.

Ultimately, "An Intellectual History of Cannibalism" is the story of the birth of modernity and of the philosophies of culture that arose in the wake of the Enlightenment. It is a book that lays bare the darker fears and impulses that course through the Western intellectual tradition

The writer-narrator of The Bulgarian Truck has hit upon a new technique for writing a novel, which he calls "a building site beneath the open sky," but he cannot persuade his more widely read wife, Marianne, a character from an earlier novel, that it is any good. Meanwhile, the narrator's extramarital affair with Milena, a young Slovak novelist who writes in French, turns sour. Interspersed among the narrator's accounts of his novel's growing pains are stories of the characters he has invented-Tsvetan, a Bulgarian truck driver, and Beatrice, an impenetrable French erotic dancer-unfolding according to their own logic while hurtling toward a fatal conclusion.

The year is 1959, one of the darkest periods of Romania's communist regime. Political prisoner Bruno Matei, a puppeteer of Italian ancestry, has been released from jail a broken man, suffering from amnesia. An uneasy relationship forms between `Matei Brunul' and Bojin, the secret policeman who keeps him under constant surveillance. Gradually, the secret police will try to remould Matei's mind by rewriting his past, turning the puppeteer into a puppet of the new totalitarian order. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei's prison experiences: the story of an innocent man physically and mentally crushed by the totalitarian system, which explodes the manipulative fictions of the secret police one by one. Matei Brunul was the first Romanian novel to explore the carceral world of the former regime, but it is also a subtle meditation on Heinrich von Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre and the ways in which a totalitarian state and ultimately fiction itself create and manipulate puppets.

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 an Old Commie! is a subtle and humane novel about self-deception, but also about the ways in which a totalitarian state twisted ordinary lives.

Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.

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 horrific killings, burned villages, and massive deportations. In this moving chronicle of 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-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.