Writing: Non-Fiction
Featured Memoir & Essays:
- “Maşina timpului: Amintiri cu Mircea Eliade” [“The Time Machine: Remembering Mircea Eliade”].Viaţa Românească nr. 11-12/2011, p. 26-35
Read this article (in Romanian) in HTML HERE or in PDF HERE (scroll to p. 26)
Viaţa Românească (founded 1906) is a prestigious Romanian print and electronic journal. Set in Paris and Berlin, “The Time Machine” is a memoir that depicts childhood encounters with emigré intellectuals such as University of Chicago professor and historian of religions Mircea Eliade, the author of the novel The Forbidden Forest, trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park Stevenson (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), and Romanian Jewish actress Leny Caler, the muse of persecuted playwright Mihail Sebastian (b. Iosif Mendel Hechter).
Listen to Leny Caler sing Nello Manzetti’s slowfox Everything You Want (Tot ce vrei) (1930) HERE
Read David Finkle’s review of David Auburn’s play The Journals of Mihail Sebastian HERE
- “Nota legatarului” [“Literary Executor’s Note”].Viaţa Românească nr. 5/2008, p. 18-19
Read this essay (in Romanian) in HTML HERE or in PDF HERE (scroll to p. 18)
Written on behalf of her father, author Ştefan Bănulescu, whose literary estate Sultana represents, this essay argues that some of his prose, such as the short stories “Gaudeamus” and “Condrat,” and the novel The Milllionaire’s Book, is intentionally conceived as apparently incomplete, or perpetually open-ended, in the Dostoevskyan tradition of Netocika Nezvanova (1849), which Ştefan Bănulescu regarded and admired as an “open-ended novella,” rather than an “unfinished novel.”
For background, read THIS chapter by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, “Dostoevsky’s Orphan Text: Netocika Nezvanova,” from her book Before They Were Titans: Essays on the Early Works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015), p. 115-150.
Other Memoir & Essays:
- “Ganduri de la Sultana Banulescu” [Thoughts from Sultana Banulescu”]. Printre Carti 7 (October 2024): 15.
- “Mihaela Guga Banulescu (1943-1999): Nota biografica” [“Mihaela Guga Banulescu (1943-1999): Biographical Essay”]. Printre Carti 4 (May 2023): 8-9
- “In materie de Stefan Banulescu, mai bine putin si stralucit decat mult si prost”[“All About Stefan Banulescu: Less Is More”]. Printre Carti 2 (May 2022): 3-4
- “Este trebuinta la noi de o casa culturala” [“We Need a Cultural Venue”]. Printre Carti 1 (October 2021): 10-11
- “Un document al reabilitării” [“An Act of Rehabilitation”]. Viata Romaneasca 11-12 (Nov- Dec 2018): 3
Printre Carti is a biannual cultural print journal edited by Ialomiţa County Library (Slobozia, Romania)
Sultana Banulescu 