At the centre of "The Hooligan's Return" is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea's book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative w...

Set in New York City in the months preceding 9/11, Norman Manea's novel introduces us to the protagonist who, like the author himself, is a Romanian professor in exile and who struggles with loneliness, dislocation, the desire to hide. Yet his diffic...

In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, the four novellas of "Compulsory Happiness" create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of t...

Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays on the subject of exile, he explores the lan...

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds", is investigating his father's death...