In Mirela Roznoveanu's new book of fiction, human love is everywhere but strangely hard to find. Love animates a world where the tangled web of sexuality, commitment, language, place, and history enthralls us with its tantalizing detours, its cruel pretenders, and its unexpected pleasures.

These tumultuous pages introduce us to people we can instantly recognize and never forget. From adventures that vividly signal a lifetime's meaning each returns with something new-something utterly different from that which was sought.

Here in her first major work in English, we find the pulsing, streaming vision of time, place, history and character that distinguishes Roznoveanu's work in her native Romanian. Roznoveanu restores a visionary spirit lost to English for two or more generations. These stories come to us in the circuitous wake of the great early modernists, offering prodigious healing power for the grave psychic wounds that have afflicted the human condition since the crucial turning point of 1945.

The Life Manager and Other Stories scintillates with cascades of luminous images and narrative reversals that seize our attention and don't let go. This is a book to return to again and again for its endlessly intriguing glimpses of the elusive peace and joy our souls thirst for.