Romania's comic genius Marin Sorescu was so popular during the worst of the Ceausescu years that his readings had to be held in football stadiums, and his books sold hundreds of thousands of copies. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the regime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he did not dare publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems is a...

The main characterthe protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandthas six toes, sleeps in a grave, and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons. Sucked into the vortex of Spider's philandering mind is a narratorsometimes Spider's adversary, sometimes his victimwho lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings and homicidal tendencies. A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, "Mystery in Spiderville" is one of the strangest,...

Welcome to the Cafe des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge."