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.

Though best known now for his novels, this collection of pre-exile short stories by the renowned Romanian author and "onirist" not only show Dumitru Tsepeneag at his best, but provide a glimpse into the secret history of surrealism uunder the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. In these stories, life is both banal and bizarre, on the verge of breaking down, like a film loop played once too often, with the hot glare of irrationality always waiting to burn through. Looking forward to "Vain Art of the Fugue" and back to Breton, "Waiting" is a subversive delicacy.

Here is a book about a man, supposedly a writer, who tries to write a novel, because he promised his readers he would. But he doesn't have anything to say. He keeps erasing what he writes, and rewriting it, without having the slightest idea where he's going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel. His three friends, Edmond, Edgar, and Edouard, will aid him in his task . . . Pigeon Post will be the second book Dalkey Archive has published by the Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag (after the critically acclaimed Vain Art of the Fugue), and we will be publishing more of his works in the years to come.