Theodoros - by Mircea Că & rtă & rescu (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A "pseudo-historical" epic of human ambition and the quest for power, from Romania's most celebrated contemporary writer.

Narrated in the second person, seven archangels relay the captivating and frequently terrifying tale of Theodoros (or Tudor, or Tewodros, as he is variably known): a servant, a runaway, a pirate, an emperor, a lovesick romantic. From Wallachia to Greece to Ethiopia, "you" undertake a series of surreal quests rooted as much in real-life history as they are in legend and myth.

A departure from the surrealist self-investigations of Solenoid and Blinding, Theodoros retains all the sentence-level linguistic brilliance that has gained Cărtărescu worldwide critical acclaim. The novel is rife with literary and artistic references, so much so that following these threads is as engrossing as following the ingenious twists of our anti-hero's journey. From Borges to Bulgakov, from Byzantine to Baroque art, Cărtărescu delights in allusions and flamboyant surrealities. His self-described "first proper novel," Theodoros is ultimately a tale of the power and joy of telling stories, the interconnectedness of all art, and the contradictions and incongruencies that make us human.

About the Author

The author of more than twenty-five books, Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic and essayist. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others, and has been translated into 23 languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago Books in Sean Cotter's English translation. Solenoid, published by Deep Vellum, won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. He lives in Bucharest.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T. O. Bobe's Curl and Nichita Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which received the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry in 2013. His translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021. His English-language translation of Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.