Romania took hold of my heart in 2015 and since then has consumed my mind and soul. As with any genuine commitment, my relationship with this beautiful, complex country has grown and deepened over time as I have learned of its many tragedies, as well as its many triumphs. I have surrendered myself to Romania. [...] As I continue my Romanian journey, I marvel over the resiliency and fortitude of the people. I am fortunate to have developed close relationships, familial in many ways, with many Romanians. And I am eternally grateful to have been granted a Fulbright and honored to become part of this amazing community.
Book Launch at Cărturești & Friends: Too Great a Sky
Liliana Corobca’s novel Too Great a Sky (Seven Stories Press, 2024), translated into English by Fulbright alumna Monica Cure, will be launched at Cărturești & Friends on Friday, December 13, at 6 p.m. Come meet the author and translator for an engaging discussion with readers, followed by an upside-down book signing.
————–
About the book
“The story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina, an exercise in historical memory which demonstrates how to maintain humanity in impossible conditions. A new novel from Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure.
Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of story-telling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great grand-daughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.”—Seven Stories Press
“One of the novel’s remarkable accomplishments is the complex fictional universe that Corobca creates through the lens of Ana: a peasant woman reflecting on a life caught up in the wheels of twentieth-century history”—Costică Brădățan for Times Literary Supplement
“As a Ukrainian, Too Great a Sky’s depiction of the Soviet deportations in Bukovina in the 20th century remind me of those now occurring in Mariupol and other occupied cities in Ukraine. Corobca’s moving story lets the reader into this experience, in which locals are driven out and the new ‘masters’ declare the land as ‘always theirs.’ We should all hear stories like this one.”—Artem Chapeye, author of The Ukraine
————–
LILIANA COROBCA is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists’ residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.
MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.