Bogdan Stanescu, 27, started working in publishing in 2005, after spending five years as a cultural journalist and TV producer. Hired as editor-in-chief by Polirom, Romania’s biggest publishing house, he faced the challenge of quickly learning about the industry. Before long he was Editorial Director (2006), becoming the country’s youngest professional in that position.

He has since built a great team of editors and translators, and expanded Polirom’s editorial range. Dealing mainly with fiction, he created new collections on ‘chic-literature’ and thrillers, and acquired important translation rights – such as Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Kiran Desai’s novels.

Working at what he describes to be an 'infernal' pace, he manages to publish two or three books per week, while being continuously involved with the activities of Polirom’s imprint, Cartea Romaneasca, focused on Romanian literature.

Book Pitch

Născut în URSS (Born in the USSR)
by Vasile Ernu (Polirom Publishing House)

Hold on to your hats: there was life under communism; there were people who laughed and danced under communism. Ernus’s book contributes to the critical resistance to a new form of hegemonic ideology: the idea that communism was some sort of neo-Medieval Age, a world of darkness, evil, and savagery. Dialoguing with the daily life of his past, Ernu invites us to make uninhibited comparisons and reveal the dangers in the new dogmatic, provincial and predicatable anti-communism that has emerged in Romania’s post-industrial capitalist age. A book full of self-reflective humour, in the tradition of Ilf and Petrov, favouring a critical analysis of the past and the conscience of our presence.

The three other books Bogdan is presenting from Romania are:

Băiuţeii (Two lads from Băiuţ Alley) by Filip and Matei Florian (Polirom Publishing House)
This unusual novel, written by two brothers (one eleven years older than the other), is a recollection of childhood memories of the Communist era. Two different voices, separated by age and personality, reconstruct their shared daily life in a typical Bucharest alley.

Lindenfeld by Ioan T. Morar (Polirom Publishing House)
Klaus Bernath returns home after twenty years as a refugee in Germany. Now a millionaire, he moves back to Lindenfeld, a Swabian village in the Banat region, where his heirs stage a recreation of past days in order to conceal changes and time from him.

Sunt o babă comunistă (I am an old Communist hag) by Dan Lungu (Polirom Publishing House)
How can someone be nostalgic about a past full of food shortages and no heating? This is Dan Lungu's question in his highly-entertaining novel, which parodies the paradoxical remembrance of communist times in contemporary Romania.