Xlibris Publishing introduces Mirela Roznoveanu, author of Life on the Run.
Please briefly describe your book.
Life On the Run is in a way the novel of intellectual dissent; a novel of great inner tensions, with unpredictable resolutions. This epic architecture – I call it using my own concept developed in the essay The Civilization of the Novel – is organized around the theme of freedom. Life On the Run is a poignant novel and an essential historical and human document. As a novel, it captures the visceral experience of immigration and exile like no other book, fiction or nonfiction I know. It evokes also the ancient Romanian culture I come from—rich with magic, portent, and enigma—and its poisoning by Communism.
The novel gives also a fresh view of the dynamic, jarring culture of America. The novel incorporates fragments from my journals from the period immediately following Romania’s 1989 revolution. I think that by preserving this record, the novel has saved from oblivion the struggle of democratic activists, artists, and journalists whose hopes for a free Romania surged with Ceausescu’s fall but were brutally crushed. Published in Romania 20 years ago, the novel was never sold in Romania’s bookstores. The publisher went bankrupt right after the printing, and the copies ended in a warehouse. Still there. I translated it because little is known in the West of this critical period in which ruling communists changed their skin without ever releasing their grip on power. The novel brings that human tragedy to life. I lived it and I still live its consequences—as Romania does today.
Who is the author “behind” the book?
I am a literary critic, writer, and journalist. I published novels, literary criticism, essays, and poetry. I was a dissident journalist during the turbulent period of communist Romania’s late eighties. I hold a MA in Romance Languages from University of Bucharest (1970), a master’s degree in Information Science magna cum laude and Beta Phi Mu from New York City’s Pratt Institute (1996), and a Certificate in Internet Technologies – New York University (1997.) After the refusal to attend the Communist Academy “Stefan Gheorghiu” in Romania, I was fired in 1974 from the literary and cultural magazine “Tomis” in Constanta, where I had been a senior columnist. I had been fired almost all the time in Romania because I wasn’t politically correct.
During 1975-1979 I contributed to the Romanian Television, as a free-lance TV host and producer. Between 1978 and 1989 I worked as a senior columnist for the cultural magazine “Magazin”, published by the “Romania Libera” newspaper. In April 1989, during the processing of the journalists who printed an anti-communist publication, the Securitate, investigated, fired and punished me to work as a “health worker.” My books and writing were banned. I had been a founder member of important post-revolution democratic associations.
Why I left Romania? The readers of this novel will find the answer. In January 1991, I moved to the U.S. and went back to school while working hard to support my family. I arrived in the US with my 10 years old son, and without knowing the English language. In time I had become a tenured, full-time faculty member of the NYU School of Law (Associate Curator: International and Foreign Law Librarian, 1996–2013). From 2005-2015 I had been the Editor in Chief of Globalex http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex as Adjunct Associate Curator with the NYU Hauser Global Law School Program, and from that time on, the Honorary Editor.
On December 2000, I was honored by the President of Romania Emil Constantinescu, for exceptional contributions from abroad in the service of Romanian culture and democracy. I had been named an Officer of the National Order for Faithful Service. The second edition of my book The Civilization of the Novel: A History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote received the 2008 Award of the Romanian Society of Comparative Literature and the 2008 Award of the Romanian Academy.
Xlibris Publishing will return with Mirela Roznoveanu in Part 2.
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