Join us for a fun night of translation with Sean Cotter, as he discusses his newest translation CURL! Out now from Wakefield Press! RSVP Here
About the Book
Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He is one-point-sixty-two meters tall and weighs fifty-eight kilograms. He is also the fastest barber in the world. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave.
Mr. Gica’s shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs, and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, fantasies of Edith Piaf, four lost hippies, and other ludic figures—including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu.
Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references, and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness.
T. O. BOBE is a prize-winning Romanian poet, novelist, and screenwriter living in Bucharest.
SEAN COTTER has translated many works of Romanian literature, including Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding (Archipelago Books, 2013) and Wheel with a Single Spoke, a selection from Nichita Stănescu (Archipelago Books, 2012), winner of the Best Translated Book Award for poetry. He is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is part of the Center for Translation Studies.
