Free and open to the public

Presented with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute

Inprint and Deep Vellum invite you to an intimate evening with acclaimed Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu. Cărtărescu will read from his latest novel Solenoid, followed by a conversation with Rice University faculty member Andrea Bajani. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing.

Mircea Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the FIL Guadalajara Literary Award in Romance Languages (2022), 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 into twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter’s English translation in 2013. His most recent novel in English, Solenoid, translated by Cotter and published by Deep Vellum, was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, and Words Without Borders, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

Andrea Bajani is one of the most acclaimed and award-winning novelists of contemporary Italian and European literature. He is the author of 9 books, including Se consideri le colpe (If you Kept a Record of Sins), Ogni promessa (Every Promise), and Il libro delle case (The Book of Homes). He is the editor of Le storie che raccontiamo (The Stories We Tell), a collection of essays about writing, including texts by Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Michael Ondaatje. He also regularly contributes to the daily newspapers la Repubblica and il manifesto, and his monthly column for the magazine Domus is entitled Case d’altri (Others’ Houses). His honors include the Bagutta Prize, the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize, among others. Bajani teaches at Rice University in the Department of English and the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures.