CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Mircea Cărtărescu in conversation with Mauro Javier Cardenas

City Lights in conjunction with Deep Vellum and the Romanian Cultural Institute present Mircea Cărtărescu in conversation with Mauro Javier Cardenas celebrating the publication of the novel "Solenoid" by Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter) Published by Deep Vellum Books To learn more about "Solenoid" visit this link: https://citylights.com/solenoid-tr-se... Based on Cărtărescu’s own role 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. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history— the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present. Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist. He has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novels include Blinding (published by Archipelago Books,) Nostalgia (published by New Directions) and Solenoid (published by Deep Vellum.) Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). In 2016 he received a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 the Hay Festival included him in Bogota 39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists. His interviews and essays on/with László Krasznahorkai, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Tatiana Huezo have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, ZYZZYVA, and The Quarterly Conversation. This event was originally broadcast on Monday, April 4, 2023 and was hosted by Peter Maravelis of City Lights. Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/