Anthologies (various) Bucharest tales

Previous New Europe Writers anthologies have focused on Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague, and, like Bucharest Tales, each chooses material by writers, native and otherwise, that .captures the vitality and variety of this dynamic place and time.. In this volume, while most of the writers are Romanian, a few are from elsewhere, and 15 are native speakers of English. Of those contributors who give their ages, most are 40 and over. Age is significant in this context because these writers were at or near adulthood when the Ceausescus fell, and one of the obvious questions about an anthology of this type is how heavily memories of the former regime and perceptions of the transition to imperfect democracy (redundant, of course) weigh upon the contents. Answers vary, of course, from what one might expect (mostly in the fiction) to less than one might fear (mostly in the poetry). It seems unreasonable to expect either the experience or the memory of a national trauma to fade in two decades. Some of the liveliest stories in the collection use fantasy to explore the Romanian condition.

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