A collection of stories revealing the quiet desperation of everyday people in communist Romania

DANIELA CRASNARU won the Romanian Academy Prize, Romania's highest literary honor, in 1991, and is currently a diplomat, serving as Program Director of the Romanian Academy in Rome. Her works include Sea-Level Zero (BOA, 1999) and Letters from Darkness: Poems (Oxford, 1992). She has been a fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program, a visiting professor of European poetry in Heidelberg, and a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

ADAM J. SORKIN has published translations of poetry in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Keyon Review, and Poetry. He is the translator of Marin Sorescu's The Bridge, Ioana Ieronim's The Triumph of the Water Witch, and Liliana Ursu's The Sky behind the Forest. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State Unviersity.