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PART II - THE SALT MINEexcerpt The second day in the salt mine Zahei's push-cart lay broken. The man was free to do whatever he wanted to. He asked to return to his tally on the walls. But the guard was not allowed to leave his post in the mine and no one was allowed

excerpts As he wandered out in the yard that night, as every night, actually, Platamonu saw the fire lights towards the East. He thought it should be in Teleorman, at the border of the district, or maybe in Izvoru. Anyway, it was a sign that the uprising was closing up

It was the month of June, 1821. Tudor Vladimirescu had risen from the darkness of Oltenia's forests; he had carried from Cernetzi all the way to Bucharest the light of his prophetic claims and he had set down like the sun, somewhere between Goleshti and Targovishte,

Chapter IVexcerpts The doorbell rang earnestly. I had noticed, during my long career as an art scholar, that all of my doorbells manifested a sort of unexpected zeal, an eagerness that suggested that these tiny technical devices strove to reach the condition of an animate

excerpts THE UNHAPPINESS OF KINGSCONSTANTINE THE LOST THE FIRST. CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE He was called Constantine the Lost for he was first seen and found on Horse Island with no known parents, and without his being able to tell whence he came or what he was doing in

Most of the characters of Romanian fiction are outcasts and misfits and they duly suffer from it. This is not surprising, given the high speed of change experienced in the past two hundred years of Romanian history. When circumstances alter in such a rapid way, the individual

A Great Man is one of the short stories that has haunted me since adolescence when I accidentally found it on one of the shelves in my bookcase, in a volume of short stories by Eliade. I was intrigued by the title and I chose to read it first. Its reading brought in front

I had known Cucoanesh as far back as the first high school years, but we had never made friends. In university, I lost touch with him. I only learnt that he entered the PolytechnicUniversity. Meeting him, by accident, in a tobacconist's, he told me that he had graduated

 Avram, the verger of Saint Nicholas church, limping on one foot and shoed with a thick sole, hung on the rope of the church bells like an old monkey. On the side of the twisted leg, the arm was twice as long, and his hand seized the rope from above with the agility of

Though your face is sparsely smearedWith the semblance of a beard –Mind you, not a beard as such –You do have that female touch. Your eyebrow line –Girlishly fine,Your underarm –Such maiden charm. Legs of a childAnd undefiled. As for your thighs,Their goodly sizeCasts

At first sight, nothing could be more reasonable or understandable than the illustration of the present issue of PLURAL. As the texts spin around the sexual obsession in Romanian literature, running from Creanga`s licentious Tale of All Tales to Agopian and Aldulescu`s swank,

It so happened that I lived for a while in Polynesia, and this extends the story up to the Antipodes. I had recently come back from the countries of the South Pacific, from the Polynesian islands. I was bringing with me the brain tomographies of a Maori minister, the file