Poetry. Southeastern European Studies. Selected and Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivanescu, and Bogdan Stafenescu. Some of the most groundbreaking works of European literature, such as Rimbaud's Illuminations and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, have been prose poetry. The present volume--a substantial selection from three contemporary Romanian prose poets--draws on this tradition. Cristian Popescu experimented with personal myth by parodying his family and himself. The Bucharest found here is often sinister, cold, and dark. Displaying a mordant sensibility that could be called "urban pastoral" rather than political, he conducts his convivial disputations with God in the vernacular of the street. Iustin Panta, from Sibiu in Transylvania, is more lyrical and intimate in exploring his personal autobiography. An amalgam of form, his prose poem takes on an aura of suspended meaning, a constellation of objects, gestures, conversations, and private associations that eschews the grotesquerie and solecism found in Popescu's work. Radu Andriescu is from the artistic hotbed of Iasi, straddling the Moldavian border. His work is exuberant, direct, often manic (see his Club 8 Manifesto), and he is completely comfortable appropriating the forms of today's digital and media culture. A complex topography of language, his work ranges from the quotidian to inner meditations to fantasy, creating a texture that is thick with images and phrases often bordering on the absurd.

For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry's most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a writer of highly musical poetry that he spun round in his fingers with the aplomb of a magician who refuted reality, he ended up stuck in free verse, impelled mainly because of the surrealism of a world in which the label and the content of any box seldom matched. After his first gratuitous exercises when he was 22 and striving to commit himself to love poetry, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker employed in a factory producing bicycle parts who, stealing a tiny wheel one day, a few nuts and bolts on another, a gear, then taking home a chain and a length of pipe, until finally realising to his amazement that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society. A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions. In 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he'd always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.

Canting Arms (the heraldic term refers to coats of arms that are visual puns) is the fitting title for Galaicu-Păun’s selected poems. His style is rich with references at once both playful and thematically serious, ironic, at times comic, and always bristling with verbal energy and unexpected turns in strong, limber lines.. This collection spans his earlier poems with scriptural and erotic references to later, more complex political, historical, psychologically astute works, sardonic, visionary, as well as surprising.

Winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation The Bridge is Marin Sorescu's farewell to life: a book of wryly quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks as he waited for death to take him, his testament not just to human mortality and pain but to resistance and creative transformation. The Bridge is unlike any other poetry book: like a medieval dance of death but sombre in movement, a procession of breathlessly spoken, painfully comic poems. Marin Sorescu was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the regime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later - like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas - the peasant-born people's poet was made Minister of Culture.

A Deafening Silence is the first UK publication by one of Romania's leading contemporary poets. Selecting from over twenty years' output, this bilingual volume offers an ideal introduction to her work. Magda Carneci is also an art essayist and prose writer, and currently lives between Paris and Bucharest. A member of the well-known "Generation of the '80s" in Romanian literature, she became actively involved in the political and cultural Romanian scene after the 1989 Revolution. At present she is president of PEN Club Romania, and is also a member of the European Cultural Parliament. Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages and have appeared in many anthologies and international reviews. Her Ph.D. thesis was published under the title Art and Power in Romania 1945-1989 (Paris, 2007), and in 2011 her novel FEM was nominated for several national prizes. She has also published several volumes of essays. She has translated a number of British and American poets into Rom-anian, such as Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, Menna Elfyn, Carolyn Forche, Christopher Merrill, Fiona Sampson, Medbh McGuckian, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore and Yang Lian, among others.

Spanning three decades of his literary career, from "Catch-22" to comments on the Persian Gulf War, Conversations with Joseph Heller contains a selection of the most significant, informative, and interesting interviews with one of America's foremost novelists.

In these interviews Heller reveals his interest in the structure, effects, and themes of his works, his satirical purposes, the influences upon him, his writing methods, his political opinions, and a host of other topics that challenge and engage his lively and reflective mind.

Included here are two interviews not previously published, interviews from student newspapers and university magazines, and two highly comic "anti-interviews" with close friends Mel Brooks and George Mandel.

Here are two largely serious interviews with his friends Robert Alan Aurthur and Barbara Gelb. Also in this collection are Heller's conversations with authors Martin Amis and George Plimpton and a probing exchange with Bill Moyers about democracy, politics, and Heller's "Picture This." Among the interviews are his talks with Sam Merrill in "Playboy," Paul Krassner of "The Realist," and with Chet Flippo of "Rolling Stone."