Join us for a reading of Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, together with his translator, Sean Cotter, on Monday, April 10, at 5:30 p.m. in Jonsson Performance Hall.

Solenoid is a highly acclaimed masterwork of fiction based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher. The novel begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. Solenoid 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. 

Solenoid was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post. The English translation of Solenoid has also been shortlisted for the prestigious “Los Angeles Times Book Prize” for fiction—one of only five finalists. This is the second book Sean Cotter has translated into English for Mircea Cărtărescu. Cărtărescu is a Nobel Prize candidate, and Solenoid is considered his magnum opus.

Mircea Cărtărescu, poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, member of the Romanian Writers' Union and PEN Romania, and Professor Emeritus of Bucharest University is one of the most heralded contemporary Romanian writers, the author of over 35 volumes, and translated into 25 languages. He is the recipient of the FIL 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 English translations include Nostalgia (New Directions, 2005) and Blinding: Book One, published in Sean Cotter's English translation by Archipelago Books in 2013.

Sean Cotter is a Literature and Translation Studies Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter has translated 11 books, including T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems. He was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry, and his translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.