First English translation of Romanian writer Norman Manea’s novel The Liar to be released end-April

Newsroom 04/04/2012 | 14:11

Yale University Press will release two new volumes signed by Norman Manea, as well as reissuing two of his earlier novels, The Black Envelope and Compulsory Happiness, this spring.

The Liar, translated by Oana Sanziana Marian, will be available, for the first time in English, on April 24. The novel tells the story of exile in the homeland and away from it as the protagonists seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break.

On May 29, Yale University Press will release Norman Manea’s volume The Fifth Impossibility, Essays on Exile and Language. In this selection of essays, Manea explores the language and psyche of the exiled writer. He answers essential questions on censorship and on linguistic roots. He unravels the relationship of the mother tongue to the difficulties of translation. Above all, he describes what homelessness means for the writer.

Both The Liar and The Fifth Impossibility, as well as the reissuing of The Black Envelope and Compulsory Happiness, are part of Yale University Press’ series “Margellos World Republic of Letters.”

Romanian writer Norman Manea lives in the United States, where he is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer in residence at Bard College. Manea’s most acclaimed book, The Hooligan’s Return published in 2003, is an original novelistic memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.