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Ceci est un fait-divers atroce. Les Mémoires du Bal-Mabille There are dreams we seem to have lived sometime long ago, somewhere, as well as things we lived about which we ask whether they were not a dream. That's what I was thinking of yesterday evening when, rummaging

Costache is a clerk of consequence, only a few years away from retirement. He visits his daughters from his first marriage rather infrequently, and secretly, too. They did object to his remarriage, but then neither was his second wife too keen on his damsels. They didn't

excerptStanding in front of the Corso building on Calea Victoriei one day, he felt someone's familiar gaze follow him from across the street, as if to catch his eye. He crossed over, as though answering a call, and discovered a picture of Ann among several other portraits

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. P. B. Shelley When I stare at a fixed point upon the wall at length, it sometimes happens that I no longer know who I am, nor where I am. On such occasions I experience my lack of identify from afar, as if for a moment I had become a

When King Béla of Hungary decided to invite the Saxons to settle in Transylvania, the land had been severely depopulated by the Mongol invasion. The Germans came from the dry lands of Northern Europe and found here what must have seemed to them sort of a Promised Land.

To clarify the unities of place, time and action in this world: here, now and thus, when one can no longer believe in the laws of happening, because this place is not in the now, and this now does not thus give temporality to the here. The present reality of things past

Visiting cities, a consumer tourist practice, is usually presented in the same image wrapping like shopping in a boutique, or attending to a show: one goes for the glossiest package, the funniest label, the wildest excitement vouched for. As a tourist product, a city is

It may be said about some cities that they are theatrical; that – in other words – they look like a stage set. Take, for instance, Venice or Naples. It may be only an illusion, however, given a host of plays by Goldoni or Eduardo de Filippo whose plots revolve around

excerpt I am going to tell you of things that happened back in 1960 or 1961, when I was still a little girl, no more than 12 years old. I was living with my family in Moşilor Street, in one of those queer houses, with the second floor protruding a little, with two very

In Romanian, Bucharest is a plural noun. This implies it is a multifaceted city, dazzling in its diversity. However, it is not a conglomerate of villages, of boroughs, like London or New York. There are not self-contained neighborhoods, each with its main street (High Street),

excerpts NOISES OF THE CAPITAL For reasons I cannot exactly explain, the flow of ideas circulated by the independent press has strikingly dwindled to a mere trickle. One can only put it down to the times of fatigued irritation we are living through as we wait for the much

The oldest recollections of actors of your generation used to begin with the scene of a provincial school festival: the future star winning a well-known, sympathetic audience made up of parents, grandparents, family friends, touched aunts. The memory of past reality is overwhelmed