Book Seller

This book is meant as an anthology of minimalist short stories that I have published throughout the time in literary magazines, using a minimum of means to create the artistic background. In terms of style, I could mention Jack London, J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, as authors that influenced my career as a writer. Though seemingly simple, the short stories in Book Seller are carefully crafted, like exquisite pieces of jewellery and each, in turn, can represent the appropriate starting point for other challenging books. I let my characters speak for myself and give a decisive role to suggestion. This leads to a lyrical outline of the events, described as if my characters sometimes dress themselves in poetry from time to time. A moment in the existence of a character, a snippet of a moment, a coincidence, may be enough to make the beginning of a novel or the beginning of a short story similar to those found in this book.

The author, Cristian Biru, met a publisher at the Northern Railway Station in Bucharest during his studies in 1992 and accepted his works to be published for a modest amount of money each. Most of the Romanian books he would have published include in a rough translation: Kikekoa-Crime Seminars, American Lighter, The Flesh Man, The Sand Knight, The Will of the Lazy Man, Waiting for Pain, The Romanian Teacher Book, Intifada Blues, A Bully in the Blues Pub and A Minor Course on Metaphor. In 2015, he came to England for a better life, without being able to speak English. In 2016, his mother, Sultana Biru died and he had no money to come home to bury her. In 2018, his book, The Sand Knight, was translated into an Italian book under the title ‘II cavaliere di sabbia’. In 2019, Katie Idle reads his short stories application under the title Book Seller and that is how this book came about.