Novel (excerpts) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2011Kill me! is a captivating story about the perverse power of storytelling and the way fiction can become more “real” than reality. The novel tells of the relationship between two women whose friendship begins well–an older woman makes an offer to host a younger one in her apartment. Their shared life ends three years later with a crime. What seems to be the beginning of a love story–the encounter between Vali and Ramona–imperceptibly transforms into a terrifying policier: the main character proves to be Veronica Manea, the sixty-year-old woman who behaves like a vampire and relives the passion of her youth. The web that Veronica Manea weaves around the younger Ramona surrounds both of them. Old ghostly and disquieting love interests are projected against the background of exotic sites. Ramona enters Veronica Manea’s dangerous game, and the only way out is a crime; which is, of course, no way out.
Gellu Naum (1915-2001) remains one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. He started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with Andre Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s (where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne). After returning home to Romania, in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career that kept his verse inexpugnable to the Communist regime’s political agenda while continuously reshaping surrealism into a chameleonic complex oeuvre that absorbed popular culture and managed to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions. His highly influential work both encompassed and veiled political critique, Eastern and Western spirituality, occultism, literary tradition, and mordant oneiric ironies.
Novel (excerpt) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2010At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delcă, a simple, poor woman in her 70s who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. She’s a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, and it is through her that the author is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel come vividly to life. From Bucharest’s aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.
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We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced)
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