The Back Cover

Radu Cosaşu

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Radu Cosaşu’s gift of storytelling… places him among our great writers. The Czechs have Hrabal and Kundera, the Albanians Kadare, the Hungarians Imre Kertész, and we have Cosaşu. So it can’t be said that we’re doing badly.

—Ştefan Agopian

Cosaşu’s "formula" is a manufacturing secret that hasn’t been figured out by the critics yet. Rarely can one come across someone capable of being a modernist and a lover of retro props, a refined intellectual and a performance football fan, naughty and wise, romantic and experimentalist.

—Paul Cornea.

With many thanks to the website of the Romanian Jewish Community, OTP invites you to visit http://www.romanianjewish.org/en/realitatea_evreiasca_04_05.html

for further discussion of Radu Cosaşu by fellow writers and peers.

In Cosaşu, the autobiographical plays out in a Mozartian way. Elements include tenderness that can make you think of Casablanca, passionate musicality, epicurean humor, and politico-erotic irony. Pace Milan Kundera. True in the highest sense, The Survivals (Supravieţuirile) is a major work of Romanian postwar literature.

— Paul Cernat

About this issue

This July, The Observer Translation Project leaves its usual format to present a special CRISIS ISSUE. Things are tough all over. Hard Times suddenly feels like the book of the moment. The global economic crisis impacts life as we know it, and viewed from Bucharest the effects reverberate in domains that include geo-politics and publishing in Romania and abroad, with the crisis at The Observer Translation Project as an instance of a universal phenomenon. read more...

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Emiluţa has an unfortunate thought. She’ll throw herself off the top of the building. Why? What the fuck? Let’s say for the cause of PeaceonEarth, for the slumdogs, Europe, for the lonely. Which is to say she doesn’t have a ghost of a reason. Viva Walachia! The way things stand, if ...

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The bearded man was the owner of an apothecary shop where he worked with two apprentices. Nobody paid me any mind, so I spent all day in what was supposed to be the shop. I say this because it was a large, dark room full of odors—a mix of smells from everywhere. The room hadn’t been cleaned ...

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Author: Gabriela Adameşteanu
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“What you’ve got here is heaven on earth,” Vica says as she drops onto the kitchen chair. “But where’s your mother?” “At work,” Gelu lazily replies, leaning sideways against the door. “She’s doing mornings this week, didn’t you know?” He is tall and thin, with unset ...

Author: Petre Ispirescu
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Youth Without Age and Life Without Death

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