I’m a Brazilian economist working in Paris and dedicated to historical scholarship. I have always been deeply impressed by the political weight carried by economic arguments across Latin America. Debates on economic policy are typically contentious everywhere, but in Latin America, your alignment with different traditions of political economy can go a long way to determine your intellectual and political identity. At the same time, our condition as peripheral societies – and hence net importers of ideas from abroad – raises perennial questions about the meaning of a truly Latin American political economy. I hope this list will be a useful entry point for people similarly interested in these problems.
In this classic and pioneering study, Joseph Love traces how ideas about underdevelopment travelled from interwar Rumania to postwar Brazil, two peripheral regions united in their disenchantment with the promises of economic liberalism.
Household names like Mihail Manoilescu, Raúl Prebisch, and Celso Furtado come across as heirs to a long intellectual tradition connecting Russian Narodnikpopulism to Latin American dependency theory a century later.
These disparate historical actors were brought together by a shared concern with the obstacles to development posed by a world of structural economic and geopolitical inequalities, thus shining a spotlight on the conflicting interests between the West and the Rest.
This innovative study compares the history of economic ideas and ideologies in Rumania and Brazil-and more broadly, those in East Central Europe and Latin America-in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This is simply one of the greatest reading experiences I’ve had in my life. This is literature of the highest order from a writer unsurprisingly spoken about in Nobel terms; it’s arguably the greatest novel published so far this century (translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter).
To summarize a plot would not do it any justice but maybe The New York Times came closest with “an endlessly strange study of existence and the longing to escape it.”
If you’re interested in any of the following: Surrealism, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, sublime nature writing, Philosophy, Mystery, bildungsroman, reverence to other great writers: Kafka, Borges, Bruno Schulz… humor, whimsy, depth… then you’re in for the largest of treats; there’s nothing that this book does not have.
At well over 600 pages it skips by, and I cannot wait to go back and read it again.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without Borders
A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cartarescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.
Based on Cartarescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of…
I'm an ex-pastry chef at Zuma London, current food blogger and creative director at Blondelish.com and YumCreative.com. I cook and shoot food photos and videos for 10 hours a day, almost every day of the week and I wouldn't have it any other way. I consider myself an artist and cooking is an expression of my inner self. I started cooking about 15 years ago as a hobby and within a year I took it to the next level by attending a 1-year class at Southgate College in London and getting my Chef Diploma. Right after that, I landed a job as a pastry chef at Zuma London which quickly transformed me into a pro.
This book holds a dear place in my heart as it features delicious traditional recipes from my home country, Romania. It brings to life old recipes that embody Romania's historical multicultural influences. It includes unique and original recipes which you'll have a hard time finding elsewhere.
"Imbued with generosity, the spirit of community, and the flavours of a rich and varied culture" -NIGELLA LAWSON
Carpathia invites you to explore Romania's unique, bold and delicious cuisine: an exciting and unexpected amalgamation of all its diverse influences.
As a cultural melting pot its character is rooted in many traditions from Greek, Turkish and Slavic in the south and east, to Austrian, Hungarian and Saxon in the north and west.
From chargrilled aubergines, polenta fritters and butterbean hummus, to tangy bors, stuffed breads and Viennese-style layer cakes, Irina Georgescu has created over 100 mouth-watering dishes that are easy to…
As bedtime stories, I told our children my personal stories of life on a Pennsylvania farm with a city-slicker father who yearned to be a successful farmer. Growing up in a Jewish orphanage in the early 1900s, he dreamed of someday owning a farm and breathing the fresh air of the country. So many funny stories from the farm encouraged our children to say “Tell me a story when you were little, Mommy,” every night. I decided to write these down and they became my first memoir The Road Home. I love memoir and through my YouTube channel, I encourage others to “Write Your Story for Your Generations to Come.”
When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.
In the 1960s Harry Dent entered political service for love of country and liberty. Highly successful, Dent became known as the “Southern Strategist” who helped Nixon win the United States presidency. When the Watergate scandal broke and Dent was accused, his efforts at propagating American freedom seemed wasted. But Dent was found to be “more of an innocent victim than the perpetrator.” He could not deny God’s grace: Dent and Henry Kissinger were the only two of Nixon’s staff not given prison sentences. In 1978 Harry Dent embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ that his daughter Ginny had faithfully lived…
I’ve always been attracted to the Gothic before I even knew the term. From watching The Munstersas a child to wanting to live in a haunted house and devouring classic Gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho and Dracula, I’ve never been able to get enough of the Gothic. After fully exploring British Gothic in my book The Gothic Wanderer, I discovered the French Gothic tradition, which made me realize how universal the genre is. Everyone can relate to its themes of fear, death, loss, guilt, forgiveness, and redemption. On some level, we are all Gothic wanderers, trying to find meaning in what is too often a nightmarish world.
This novel, published in 1879, is set in Romania at the time of the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War. It is significant for its setting because it predates Dracula(1897) in being set in Romania (home of Transylvania). Nizet was a twenty-year-old Belgian woman who encountered Romanians in Paris who told her about how Russians had treated them during the war. Nizet created the character of Captain Vampire to represent how Russia acted like a vampire toward the Romanians, even though they were Russia’s allies. Captain Vampire’s behavior is shocking yet fascinating. As a critique of war, the novel is extremely relevant today given Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Personally, I am amazed by how a woman who never saw a battlefield could capture war’s essence so vividly.
Written in 1879 (18 years before Dracula) by 19-year-old Marie Nizet, Captain Vampire, in its method and tone alike, is way ahead of its time. Although its plot has supernatural elements, and its antagonist is manifestly demonic, the novel's true purpose is to bring out the horror of war. A significant work in the history of horror fiction, it is undoubtedly one of the finest literary works ever to have made use of the vampire motif.
Louise Ross is a non-fiction and fiction writer, speaker, and podcaster. Originally from Australia, she moved abroad in the mid-'80s, living in the UK, France, the US, and since 2014, Portugal. Her book, Women Who Walk: How 20 women from 16 countries came to live in Portugal, (2019), is a collection of mini-memoirs. In 2020, she released the sequel and comparative read, The Winding Road to Portugal: 20 Men from 11 Countries Share Their Stories. Louise lives on the Estoril coastline where she continues to interview women living in Portugal, and around the world, for her podcast, Women Who Walk.
Part spy novel, part historical fiction, this book tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who’s been deposited by his parents at the Hotel Palacio in Estoril for safekeeping during WWII, when the hotel was home to exiled European nobles and royalty, British and German spies. We meet the Polish pianist, Yan Paderewski; Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist and creator of James Bond; French writer and flyer Antoine de St. Exupery; the ex-king of Romania, Carol II, and his mistress Elena Lupescu, the woman for whom he renounced the crown. We’re privy to the goings-on at the Hotel via the lives of this cast of colourful characters in a way that’s reminiscent of the quirky movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Set in a luxurious grand hotel just outside Lisbon, at the height of the Second World War, Estoril is a delightful and poignant novel about exile, divided loyalties, fear and survival. The hotel's guests include spies, fallen kings, refugees from the Balkans, Nazis, American diplomats and stateless Jews. The Portuguese secret police broodingly observe the visitors, terrified that their country's neutrality will be compromised.
The novel seamlessly fuses the stories of its invented characters with appearances by historical figures like the ex-King Carol of Romania, the great Polish pianist Jan Paderewski, the British agent Ian Fleming, the Russian chess grandmaster…
As a Romanian-born reader who is fascinated by Vlad the Impaler's life and folklore I was drawn to Grigorcea's presentation of the ancestral homeland and Dracula's haunting legacy. Her portrayal of a post-communist society still grappling with its past echoed my own experiences and observations.
The atmosphere is eerie, dreamlike in places, and the lines between history and fiction are blurred. But Grigorcea's exploration of fate and the enigmatic figure of Dracula adds depth and complexity to the story. Yet it is not a bloodthirsty vampire novel or a modern Dracula à la Bram Stoker - which I appreciated.
It's a novel that delves not only into the historical and supernatural, but also into the enduring power of Romania's cultural heritage. Overall, a captivating and evocative read that held my attention.
In post-Communist Romania, on the border with Transylvania, the sleepy little town of B. is losing its young people to the West.
A young painter returned from Paris and her eccentric great-aunt seem unconcerned with the decline of the town, until a mutilated corpse is found in the family crypt of Prince Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula.
As the world's attention turns to B., the mayor and his son take advantage and turn the town into a vampire-inspired theme park. Tourists flock, but beneath the surface ancient horrors live on.
This is a breathtaking, atmospheric tale of revenge,…
More
than anything, this book put me in the shoes of a young person who has no idea
how to know the difference between truth and lies. He doesn’t know who to
trust. I was fully immersed in this terrifying world.
Šepetys made me feel what
it was like to live during a dictatorship leading
up to the Romanian Revolution in 1989.
I came away feeling profoundly grateful
for my freedom and in awe of those who fought for theirs.
A gut-wrenching, startling historical thriller about communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray.
Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.
Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s…
I'm an Anglo-Dutch writer living in the Netherlands, and the author of two books. Growing up in England I never thought much about rivers, but in the Netherlands they’re hard to avoid, and I’ve become fascinated by them. These days, when we all work remotely and (when rules allow) usually travel by car, train, or plane rather than boat, it’s easy to think of rivers as just scenic backdrops, rather than anything more important. But the truth is many of our cities wouldn’t exist without the waters which flow through them, and waterways like the Rhine, Thames, and Seine have had a huge influence on the history and culture of the people living alongside them. If you want to understand why somewhere like Rotterdam, London or Paris is the way it is, you could spend the day in a library or museum – but you’d be better off going for a boat ride or swim, poking around under some bridges and talking to the fishermen, boatmen, and kayakers down at the waterline.
The Danube vies with the Rhine for the title of Europe's Amazon: a behemoth that spans a huge swathe of the continent, flowing from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania. In this book, Andrew Eames travels along the river by bicycle, horse, boat, and on foot, meeting everyone from royals to boatmen and gypsies, and providing a sparkling history of south-eastern Europe on the way. Before Covid, I was planning to travel along the Danube myself and hopefully write something about it. If that ever happens, this will be in my backpack.
The Danube is Europe's Amazon. It flows through more countries than any other river on Earth - from the Black Forest in Germany to Europe's farthest fringes, where it joins the Black Sea in Romania. Andrew Eames' journey along its length brings us face to face with the Continent's bloodiest history and its most pressing issues of race and identity.
As he travels - by bicycle, horse, boat and on foot - Eames finds himself seeking a bed for the night with minor royalty, hitching a ride on a Serbian barge captained by a man called Attila and getting up…
I’m an information junkie who loves to dance. I fell in love with folk dancing at age 6, European archaeology at 11, linguistics and cognition at 21—and could never drop any of them. My scientist-father always said, “Follow the problem, not the discipline,” and I began to see how these fields could help answer each other’s questions. Words can survive for millennia—with information about what archaeologists don’t find, like oh-so-perishable cloth. Determining how to reconstruct prehistoric textiles (Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) then led me to trace the origins of various European folk costumes, and finally even to reconstruct something about the origins of the dances themselves.
Humans also draft dance to help heal body and mind. I loved Kligman’s personal ventures deep into the complex concerns about life and death, fertility and health, found in related pre-Christian rituals in three areas of the Balkans: the Căluşariin SW Romania, the Rusaltsiin NW Bulgaria, and the Kraljevi—often with other names—just west in former Yugoslavia. (The word Rusaltsicomes from Rusalka, a Slavic name for the “dancing goddess”, as does Rusalii, the thrice-yearly festival in their honor.) Her intriguing study comes from direct observation of the healing rituals, and on personal discussions with the dancers—including one who was particularly vulnerable to trance! This is also true of L. Danforth’s remarkable account of the firewalkers of SE Bulgaria and northern Greece (Firewalking and Religious Healing).
