Join ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS, author Mircea Cărtărescu, and writer, editor and former senior editor of Artforum, Eric Banks for a conversation and a reading of the first volume of Cărtărescu's Blinding, one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release.

Mircea Cărtărescu, poet, novelist, and essayist, was born in 1956 in Bucharest. As a young member of the “Blue-jeans Generation” in the 1970s, his work was strongly influenced by American writing in opposition to the official Communist ideology and by Romanian Onirism. The appearance of his book Nostalgia (New Directions) made him a young literary star in Romania. Cărtărescu is the winner of the 2000 Romanian Writers' Association Prize, the 2011 Vilenica Prize, the 2012 Haus der Kulteren der Welt International Literature Prize, the 2012 Berlin International Prize for Literature, the 2013 Swiss Leuk Spycher Preis, and the Serbian Grand Prize for International Poetry in Novi Sad. He currently lives in Bucharest.

  Eric Banks is a writer and editor based in New York and the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He is the past president of the National Book Critics Circle and continues to serve on the NBCC board. His writing has appeared in numerous national publications, including Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, theFinancial Times, Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. A former senior editor ofArtforum, he served as editor in chief of Bookforum from 2002 to 2008.

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