In this modern classic of global feminist literature, the only novel by one of Romania's most heralded poets, styled as a long letter addressed to the man she is ready to leave, a woman meanders through a cosmic retelling of her life from childhood to adulthood with visionary language and visceral detail. Like a contemporary Scheherazade, she spins captivating tales that create space in the cosmos for the female experience. Through a dreamlike thread of strange images and passing characters from the small incidents of their lives together to the intimate narrative of her relationship to womanhood, her stories invite the reader into a fantastical vision of love, loss, and femininity.

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.