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excerpt I was to deal with this vague feeling, this bizarre, somewhat abstract and pure love three times during my teenage years. I had come into this huge and empty room, lured by some strange music that I always found irresistible, insinuating, intoxicating and dangerous.

N. Manolescu promised somewhere an inventory of places where the characters in Romanian literature make love. The critic was surprised by the parsimonious frequentation of the conjugal bed, and the preference for more bucolic spots: the oven, the meadow, the haystack…

To many readers, what is permitted in the street, press, on television and even in other arts is not allowed to literature. The parent is not worried about the profusion of sexually explicit films broadcast on TV and deposited (with the pride of personal emancipation) in

ArgumentI have always regretted the lack of raw erotic detail in the most remarkable works of fiction. This frustration is by no means compensated for by the high availability of lurid, pornographic books. When reading fiction, I do not look for arousal, but for precision.

excerpt When I first met her, she said she adored Pablo Neruda's poetry and La Fontaine's erotic fables, which are un petit secret délicieux and, once a month, she would listen to a fragment of Le Petit Prince, interpreted by Gérard Philippe. She also told me

He went out of the smoky-glass building without looking back. He was treading slowly, looking at the tips of his impeccably polished Timberland shoes. He hadn't even managed to answer the porter, who may have wished him well, smiling as in a dental-floss commercial.

Bertrand had descended on our little town as if from a film: long-haired, with a beard that was still fluffy but nevertheless impressive in comparison with our teenage fuzz, and dressed in a T-shirt with Che Guevara on it. Besides, he was smoking Gauloises and was an anarchist.

Dies estexcerptsHe would kiss her and caress her breasts clutching them (as if her breasts were mere rubber balls), and he couldn't figure out just how much cheap male instinct, and how much true passion, was hiding behind his gestures. Those were the gestures of a

excerpt The following days, Mioara took the girls for a walk in Chishmigiu Park and treated them on a boat ride (the driver of the black car had rolled up his sleeves and was rowing across the lake, giving the ladies nice smiles from under his pointed moustache). Later

Years ago, I experienced a peculiar evening. My life is far from eventful, and the few significant occurrences I do remember have been sucked for all they're worth in my books. There are, nevertheless, among their number some which, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't

I lived in Amsterdam for a while, it now feels like a different lifetime, perched in the attic of a Flemish house along Watergraafsmeer. The rest of the three-storey building accommodated the owner, a lady of Polish descent, and her rubicund daughter. They would have a bath

excerpt  You haven't the slightest idea what sound the stopper makes when you hit it with that DAMNHUGEBOLT. Yes, that's the bolt I'm talking about, the bolt I'll never forget, as long as I'll live 'cause it was damn necessary to stop it without