Wooden Tongue Speaks, The: Romanians: Contradictions & Realities - Softcover

Bogdan Tiganov

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0956665802 ISBN 13: 9780956665805

Publisher: HONEST PUBLISHING, 2010

Synopsis

This collection of short stories and poetry set in post-Ceauşescu and post-cold war Romania takes readers on a journey through the author's home town of Brăila in the east of the country. Exiled Romanian author Bogdan Tiganov explores social, religious and political issues with insightful frankness, through an array of colourful characters and narratives focusing on this newly, supposedly liberated world. Tiganov's stories offer an honest and rounded view of immigration like never heard before: the opportunities and the pitfalls, the reasons for and against mass migration, the pains suffered, the euphoric hope and optimism, the naivety and the greed. This revised edition features brand new short stories and a new introduction from the author. Candid and exposing, this warts-and-all look at Romanian life with its dark undercurrent of wit cuts to the very heart of the country's culture.

About this title

Review:

With Tiganov, the intricateness of reality does not lose perspective of the intricateness of the imagination. In this way, the realm of detail becomes a political asylum. --Lucas Hüsgen, The Labyrinth is Unwilling

A collection of short stories and poems, The Wooden Tongue Speaks uncannily distills the very essence of Romanians, from the small joys and beauty to familiar warts-and-all everyday domestic blights. --Andrew Begg, Vivid

These moving memories, stories and poems explore the mind-warping paranoia created by Romania's notorious dictatorship, and are a brutally honest insight into the bleakness of its post-communist disillusion. --Helena Drysdale

A mature book from a young author, whose writing already carries the fingerprints of a personal style with powerful lyrical accents, that decants in a language crossed by a rough, uncensored sensibility contrasting images from a disintegrated universe recomposed in words from the substance of nostalgia. --Ilinca Bernea

The wonderful prose pictures that the exiled Romanian writer Bogdan Tiganov paints of everyday life under an oppressive regime are both vivid and revealing. The dialogues and arguments which punctuate many of his stories unmask the tensions and the feelings, both of profound love and intense hate, that arise within families and friendships. The `Wooden Tongue Speaks' is a worthwhile and impressive addition to the literature of Romanian exiles.
--Esther Lipton, Exiled Writers INK

About the Author:

Bogdan Tiganov is a writer and artist, born in Braila, Romania, on August 1, 1981. It was there that he started his lifelong interest in the arts, attending the Nicolai Balcescu School of Music at the age of seven, where he learned to play piano as well as composing. In London, UK, he studied visual arts under the supervision of Don Pavey, world-renowned expert on colour. Tiganov finished writing and illustrating his first book by the time he was fourteen, and attracted considerable interest from leading children's book publishers.

Since then, he has studied English Literature at degree level, received a CELTA teaching diploma from IH Barcelona, and has had various jobs, including as an English teacher, a call-centre operator, an editorial assistant, and a content editor. His short stories and poems have appeared in magazines and periodicals worldwide.

About this edition

• Publisher: HONEST PUBLISHING
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0956665802
• ISBN 13: 9780956665805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204