New Meridian Arts is a creative community dedicated to publishing innovative literature and poetry that gives voice to original writers of talent and scope around the world.
.jpg)
A Spider's History of Love
"Cărtărescu will speak to you, an astonishing voice from another world."
— Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine
"[Cărtărescu] is a member of the Romanian 'Blue Jeans Generation,' so called for their interest in Western culture, and seems at home in both American and European traditions, and in all historical periods. He cut his teeth on Pynchon and is versed in Gass and Barth. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Romanian postmodernist and oneiric literature and has taught literary history at the University of Bucharest. His own fiction weaves realism with dream, memory, myth and parable. He is also renowned as a poet."
— Martin Riker, London Review of Books
About the Author and Translator
Mircea Cărtărescu is Romania’s most celebrated writer from the highly accomplished group of self-consciously postmodernist writers who began to publish in the 1980s—the “blue-jeans generation,” one strongly influenced by American examples. His first book of poetry, Headlights, Shop Windows, Photographs, appeared in 1980. Other titles include Love Poems (1982); Everything (1984); Nothing (2010); The Levant (1990); Love (1994); a collection of love poems, Double CD (1998); Fifty Sonnets (2003); and the collected two-volume Pluriverse (2003). Adam J. Sorkin’s co-translations of Cărtărescu’s poetry in collaborative versions have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry New York, Exquisite Corpse, New Delta Review, Talisman, Poetry Wales, Parthenon West, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ping-Pong, Cutthroat, Saranac Review, Lana Turner, Connotation Press, Glint and Poem [in the UK], as well as the anthologies Leading Contemporary Poets, Speaking the Silence, Bebop Baby, Born in Utopia and Bucharest Tales. A group of fourteen of the poems came out as Bebop Baby in the Poetry New York chapbook series in 1999. He has also been Romania’s Nobel Prize nominee.
Adam J. Sorkin has published more than sixty books of Romanian poetry in translation and his work has won the 2005 Poetry Society (UK) Prize for European Poetry Translation as well as the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries, Kenneth Rexroth, Ioan Flora Poetry Translation, and Poesis Translation Prizes, among others. He has been awarded Fulbright, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, New York State Arts Council, Academy of American Poets, Soros Foundation, Romanian Cultural Institute, and US National Endowment for the Arts support for his literary activity.