Radio Romania at the Gaudeamus Bookfair

Romanian publishers and their most recent editorial projects

Corina Sabău, 17.12.2022, 14:00

The
29th edition of the GAUDEAMUS Bookfair was held over December 7 and
11 in Bucharest’s Romexpo Exhibition Compound. After two years of going online,
Romania’s most widely-read bookfair organized by the Romanian Radio Broadcasting
Corporation returned to the format that has imposed it for almost thirty years
now. At the recently-held edition of the Gaudeamus Bookfair in Bucharest more
than 600 editorial events were ongoing as part of the fair. There were more
than 200 participants who offered the reading public a very wide range of
editorial products.

Eli
Badica is the coordinator of Nemira Publishers’ N’author collection. Diana
Epure is Paralela 45 Publishers’ PR and the coordinator of the First Love
collection. We invited them both in Radio Romania International studios. We had
them speak about their publishing initiatives, specifically, about two of the
projects that have succeeded to bring today’s Romanian literature in the
spotlight. The First Love collection, coordinated by Diana Epure made its debut
with five novels written by Romanian women and men writers, Diana Geacăr,
Andrei Crăciun, Andrei Dosa, Alina Pietrăreanu and Cristina Ispas. The collection was launched at the summer edition of
the Bookfest Bookfair. It is a contemporary
Romanian literature collection targeting the young readership. It was available
at the Gaudeamus Boookfair and recent releases will surely prolong its life. With
details on that, here is Diana Epure.

There is indeed a continuity, therefore, as part of the
collection, a micro-novel by Stefan Manasia will be brought out, entitled The
Sycamores of Samothraki. Ștefan Manasia is a Generation 2000 author, he is a very
talented writer, he is a poet, an essayist and a prose writer, highly appreciated
by the readers. The Sycamores of Samothraki is Ștefan Manasia’s second prose work
and can be compared with art film for high-school students. It is about a boy
who is initiated in his quest by his uncle, the boy is warm and open-hearted and
all this warmth of the main character overflows in Stefan Manasia’s book which
I don’t think high-school students cannot fall for it. As I’ve said many times
before, I asked our writers to come up with a book for teenagers, a book they themselves
wanted to have read in secondary school or in high school, but back in the day they
didn’t have such a book. That’s how the First Love collection was started and
it is true the writers tried their best and the micro novels that came out of
their efforts were indeed extraordinary. That is the case of Stefan Manasia’s novel
that was launched at the Gaudeamus Bookfair at the stand of our publishers. I
should also like to say that at this edition of the Fair, the Paralela 45 Publishers
had the largest stand ever to have hosted the publishers’ releases, since we
wanted to have as comprehensive as possible a presentation of our publishing
house. We promote all the facets of a
publishing house for generations, just as we consider ourselves to be. And by that,
I mean all the genres the Paralela 45 Publishing House is specialized in.

Four years have passed since the Nemira Publishers has
launched N’autor, a collectipon of contemporary Romanian literature, which reflects
the world we live in, in a variety of ways. It is one of the most widely-read
contemporary Romanian literature collections. The most recent release and the most eagerly-awaited is Florin Chirculescu’s The Necromancer. Here is the
coordinator of N’Author, Eli Badica, speaking about the collection’s novelties.

Florin
Chirculescu’s book is, indeed, an event.
It is a remarkable book in any respect, stylistically, but also plot-wise, since
the central character is the towering figure of the most important Romanian
poet,
Mihai Eminescu. And
also remarkable is the fact that it succeeds to render Mihai Eminescu more
human. I do not know of any other such text, with such a wide scope, capable of
depicting so convincing a portrait of Mihai Eminescu. It is an impressively well-documented
book, whose underlying scholarship is tremendous, yet it is at once a book written
with so much originality and so much humour. Now, returning to the N’Author’s
recent releases, Raluca Nagy’s novel, A Horse in a Sea of Swans and Tales
from the Garage by Goran Mrakić, these books happened to be
brought out simultaneously, which reminds me of a tour we took in 2018, when we
had these two authors travelling with us, after the aforementioned volumes had
been launched. Actually, among the novelties you could access at Gaudeamus,
there also was Goran Mrakić’s debut novel, Death’s petty Pleasures , brought
out earlier this fall. It is a book where the author continues the literary mapping
of Banat, something he had also dealt with in the previous volume. Also this past
fall, Horea Sibișteanu’s first novel was brought out, a puzzle-novel. With this
mosaic novel, Horea Sibișteanu has already seen his second book brought out as
part of the N’autor collection. Entitled Hold Out Your Hand, Tiberiu, the novel’s
central character is a young man in pursuit of his identity, nay, he is trying
to come to terms with it. Also, he is trying to recompose his childhood of the
1990s, from scattered pieces, also trying to understand himself in a
present-time which is so very close to us. Also among the novelties there is the
first novel of Liviu Ornea, whom everybody knows to be a mathematician, a translator,
an academic, a researcher and a theater critic. After his debut with The
Future in the Past, in 2022, this year he returned with Life as a Silly Joke,
which is, like I said, his first novel.

As an absolute first, on the premises at the fair and
jointly with the partners of the recently-held edition Comic Opera for Children
and the Versus Association, two areas were arranged, dedicated to interactive
activities for the youngest visitors. The Mircea Nedelciu National Reading
Contest, targeting the high-schools students, in 2022 unfolded in an original
format, based on vide-cast essays. The theme of the contest was The Marin Preda
Centennial. Commemorating 100 years since his birthday.(EN)