Stil

excerpt  VI. MONDAY, 8 TO 9, GERMAN When I was in the first grade, I flunked French, German and Romanian. I used to spend my afternoons barefoot on the pitch, sweating, short-sighted, playing oina. [1] I had become famous for the lightning rapidity with which I would catch

The two students, Andrei Banica and Tudor Leru were in a hurry. That's why they had taken the shortcut. Leaving the highway that was taking a detour on the bank of the river Aries, they decided to climb up Vanatu, the mountain bordering on the river like a huge flat

Writing an oral history of a ten-year-old child may seem like a perfectly absurd enterprise any day of the week. The social experience of an individual of ten would not recommend an approach of this kind. With such a person it cannot be a matter of immediate memory. Hence

The jurist Matei Monorai lives nearby. If you'd hear him plead in court, you would not hesitate to call him Matei Golden Mouth. Ambrozie is on his way over, to ask Matei to plead for Vornicu, who has been sentenced to death. He arrives. Matei`s kids are playing outside,

excerpt Mother and I were working in a chocolate factory. My mother's husband was not allowed to work. He had to leave the country regularly and apply for asylum again and again. He and my mother always talked about how to make some money. We wanted to steal chocolate

It had been three days since the wind had been blowing from the east, the earth had dried up, and in the thicket from the edge of the village, on the bank of Siret, the cornel trees started to bloom, yellowish. Dumitru Onisor's youngest son took out six sheep to graze

Due to a perverse intellectual precocity, Barutzu confuses literature with lard. . . You'll get a D in Romanian! Daddikins shouted at him, offended in his pedagogy. Barutzu feels no emotion whatever. He aberrantly lacks the common sense of merit, the patriotism of class

Children, have you ever thought that the grown-ups around you used to be children once? Well, ask any of them, and you will see that they are all pleased to recall their childhood. You will be grown-ups one day, and you will tell your children about today and then you will

I was never a child, I never had childhood… warm, golden days of puerile frenzy, the long-lasting serenity of innocence, the surprise given by the daily discovery of the universe, what do all these mean to me? I know nothing of them, or I no longer remember anything. I

excerpt  THE IRON PALM TREE In front of the Burebista eating inn stops one of those tiny automobiles that no one notices, a frog Skoda or a small Fiat, one doesn't know exactly what model, because the respective car raised a huge amount of dust that the Dobrogea

excerpts CHAPTER I How had the members of the Cherry Blossom Club gotten to the town of D. ? That was not a difficult one to answer. First, the little town was not very far from its twin, where the members of the Cherry Blossom Club lived. Then, as it often happens, one

Radu TUDORAN's (penname of Nicolae Bogza) Anchors Away!, a very successful novel, later made into a film (aka Full Sail, 1976, directed by Mircea Mureşan - click to see trailer here), competing in nautical erudition, plot and length with Jules Verne's The Children