Norman Manea
Self-portrait
In the public arena, Augustus the Fool faces, unavoidably, the Clown of Power. All human tragicomedy may be seen in this encounter, in the history of the Circus as History. In the world-circus the writer - and I see myself as one- seems ill equipped for everyday life in which his fellow men offer and receive their share of credible reality. And yet his
Biography
Norman Manea is the most translated Romanian contemporary writer. His work has appeared in 20 languages and more than sixty volumes. A prolonged official campaign to discredit him in 1981, the withdrawal on the instruction of the communist authorities of his 1984 Literary Prize of the Writers’ Union of Romania, and the mutilation by the censor of his last novel The Black...
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memories, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom, 2008, 200 pages Book presentation
This interview, given by Saul Bellow to Norman Manea in December 1999, is part of the Jerusalem Literary Project’s Words & Images series, in collaboration with the Ben Gurion University of Negev, Israel. |
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memories, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom Publishing House, 2008, 520 pages, format 130 x 200 mm Book presentation
A dialogue stretching over more than two and a half decades, starting from an exchange of letters in 1982-83 – during the overwhelming degradation of life in Ceauşescu’s Romania and the anti-Semitism of nationalist communism. This epochal document acquires new meaning in the light of subsequent events, such as the public polemic of 1992 regarding Mircea Eliade and his relationship with the Iron Guard, the controversies about Roger Garaudy and the negation of the Holocaust, the new nationalism and corruption of the Romanian political and cultural post-communist elite – as they appear in the ample conversations in Jerusalem (1999) and at Bard College, New York (2007). |
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poem, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom, 2008, 184 pages Book presentation
A special book, in which the poem Speaking to the Stone, written by Norman Manea in Romanian, after a visit, as guest of honor, to the Jerusalem Book Fair in 2003, is accompanied by translations in ten languages – English (Edward Hirsch and Norman Manea), Hebrew (Yotam Reuveny), German (Ernest Wichner), Spanish (Victor Ivanovici), Czech (Jiri Nasinek), Hungarian (Balász Imre József), Polish (Jerzy Kotlinski), Swedish (Dan Shafran), French (Letiţia Ilea), and Italian (Marco Cugno). |
novel, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom Publishing House, 2008, 392 pages, format 130 x 200 mm Book presentation
The Hooligan’s Return has already been published in the USA, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, France, China, Israel, and the Czech Republic, and is due to appear in Greece, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Slovenia. The novel has received excellent reviews in the entire American press, has been “Book of the Month” and on the bestseller list in Germany, has received great praise and prizes in Italy, was declared Best Foreign Book of 2005 in Spain, and won the the 2006 Prix Médicis étranger. |
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novel, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom, 2008, 296 pages Book presentation
A novel of time suspended, in whose almost musical phrasing nostalgia is interwoven with longing for love and fulfillment. A portrait of a lost young generation confused and oppressed by a bleak, closed society, yet searching for a more human, luminous shore. Above all, it is a story of the thoughts that might have been spoken, of the things that might have been done.
“More than three decades after its first edition, Atrium demands of the reader the same deep understanding of the contortions of outraged intimacy whose reconstruction is essayed by writing. The private world of the ‘I,’ the traumatized identities are recreated in the mirrors of the self, with and for the Other – the premise of Norman Manea’s writing.” (Simona SORA)
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short prose, The Norman Manea author series, Polirom Publishing House, 2008 Book presentation
This rich and fascinating volume collects splendid short prose from The Night on the Long Edge (1969), The First Gates (1975), and October, eight o’clock (1st edition : 1981, 2nd edition: 1997). The narratives “A Sentimental Education”, “A Reading in Kinderland” and “Lunar Nights” appear for the first time in a Romanian volume.
“Describing and scrutinizing the biographic journey of the same narrator, as central character – in many respects similar, without ever being identical, to the author himself – these linked sketches and novellas can ultimately be seen as a hypothetical ‘Bildungsroman.’ Fragments of a broader epic they immerse the reader in the formation and deformation of a sensibility, from a troubled childhood in a concentration camp or the theatrical revival in the first postwar years to a solitary maturity searching for hope and happiness in the narrow frame of a perverse, Byzantine communist dictatorship.” (Norman Manea) |