Introducing "Little Fingers" with Filip Florian
RCINY organizes a special series of literary events introducing Romanian writer Filip Florian, presenting in NYC his upcoming English edition of the acclaimed novel "Little Fingers", to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this summer (translation by Alistair Blyth).
The events, to take place during the PEN World Voices Festival, will include readings from the book, dialogues and encounters with the author. Florian will be joined by Simona Kessler, representating one of the most active Romanian literary agencies, in a dialogue about contemporary Romanian literature, its translation and reception abroad. More details will be available soon.
About "Little Fingers"
In a little town in Romania, a mass grave is discovered near the excavations of a Roman fort. Are the dead the victims of a medieval plague or, perhaps, of a Communist firing squad? And why are finger bones disappearing from the pit each night? Petrus, a young archaeologist, decides to do some investigating of his own.
Florian has packed real history, a religious pilgrimage, a criminal investigation, a recipe for roast pigeon, and a love story into two hundred truly remarkable pages.
Filip Florian (b.1968). Between 1990-99, he worked as a journalist and editor for the Cuvintul (The Word) weekly and then as a correspondent for the Free Europe and Deutsche Welle radio stations. He spent five years in the mountain town of Sinaia writing his first novel Little Fingers, which was published to great critical acclaim by Polirom in 2005. Greeted as the work of a distinctive and original new voice, the novel was awarded the Romania literara (Literary Romania) magazine Prize for Debut, the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Best Prose Debut, and the National Union of Employers Prize for Excellence. Together with Matei Florian, his younger brother, Filip Florian recently published the unusual dialogic novel The Băiuţ Alley Lads (Polirom, 2006), also warmly praised by critics and the reading public alike. In 2007, second editions of both books were printed. Little Fingers has been published in Hungary (Magvetö, 2008), Germany (Suhrkamp, 2008) and Poland (Czarne, 2008) and will be published in the USA (Harcourt, 2009) and Slovenia (Didakta, 2009). The Băiuţ Alley Lads is also due to be published by Czarne in 2009.
