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Support for this publication has been provided by a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute's Translation and Publication Support program.
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episodes between twilight and darkness
by Sorana Gurian
translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh
cover and frontispiece by Karel Teige
Sorana Gurian (1913-56) debuted in 1946 with an autobiographical novel (later translated into French) and the collection
of short fiction Episodes Between Twilight and Darkness. Exploring corporeality, desire, and sexuality from the
female perspective as a way to subvert the objectification of women prevalent then in Romanian literature,
Gurian employs many of the devices associated with modernism: inner monologue; shifting tenses, perspectives, and voices;
dream sequences. Her women unapologetically exercise their agency through casual hookups, professional independence, illicit
activities (she was thought to be a French spy), and even suicide while transgressing traditional gender roles and marital
propriety. This so incensed the male critics of the day that they vented their moral outrage by labeling the
collection “vulgar,” “scandalous,” “decadent,” and thereby insuring Gurian’s work would be forgotten and never reissued for
many decades, even though she had been prominent among interwar Romanian modernists and editor of a major periodical. In the
last year of her life, bedridden in Paris and losing her battle against cancer, she was visited by Czesław Miłosz, who came
away so impressed he had to ruefully remark: “The name of Sorana Gurian will not be preserved in the chronicles of humanity.”
It is to translator Gabi Reigh’s great credit that she took this remark as a summons.
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ISBN 9788088628156
269 pp., 140 x 200 mm
softcover with flaps
1 b/w illustration
short fiction
publication:
spring 2027
pre-order directly:
airmail postage & handling incl.
will ship in January 2027
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