PiE

Mateiu Caragiale left us a literary heritage, fragmentary in its outlook that puzzled and amazed through its originality, through an appetite for mystery it seemed to originate in, through the secret inspiration that fed it and through its old-fashioned lyricism which was

excerpts Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l'Orient, où tout est pris à la légère. Raymond Poincaré*Welcoming the Philanderers…au tapis-franc nous étions réunis. L. Protat**Although no further than the night before I had promised myself under

Mateiu Caragiale was the natural son of Ion Luca Caragiale, the greatest Romanian playwright. However, his literary output appears like a challenge to his heredity rather than a filiation. The world portrayed is the same, the Balkan one, with its mixture of pretension and

*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, and

1. His parents christened him Dimitrie, but he knew the appropriate name for himself, so he changed it to Demetru. He had said this himself, people should find names for themselves in tune with their own personal reality, or they should change themselves, while that is still

I Fuchs was not born by his real mother… At the beginning, when he came into being, he was not even seen, but only heard, because when Fuchs was born he preferred coming out through one of his grandmother's ears, as his own mother did not have an ear for music…

[1]Algazy is an old, loveable, toothless, smiling old man; his beard is shaven and silky, beautifully displayed on a grid, screwed up under his chin and enclosed with barbed wire… Algazy does not speak any European language… If you wait for him, however, at dawn, when

Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău, whose pen-name was Urmuz, published his first bizarre pages in 1922 and killed himself in 1923. His life was short, his literary life was one of the shortest ever, and his work is comparably short: just a few short stories. Yet his influence on

This issue is dedicated to some of the most significant bizarre, atypical figures in Romanian literature. Although it consists of a selection of literary sketches and fragments of novels, it can be best described as an anthology of twentieth-century poetic prose, stretching

excerptTo put it in a nutshell, there are three races living in Congo today:The Pygmies, scattered all over the territory and on the verge of extinction;Nuba, the invaders who live in the north – and, finallyThe Bantu, the most numerous. Several distinct and independent

excerptAbout the Earth's Crust A loud knock on the door of the cabin disturbs my sweet morning sleep. Gibrelterra!… Gibrelterra!… I rub my eyes sleepily and, without understanding anything, I ask stroppily: what is it? what's happened?Gibrelterra!…We can

Lisbon, a town whose name comes from the mythical traveler Ulysses – so they say – , illustrated in the Middle Ages by so many navigators and explorers curious and eager for adventure, shows to the visitor first its drowsy side. It is true that I first visited it on