Beautiful Strangers

Beautiful Strangers (Romanian: Frumoasele străine) is a 2010 prose collection by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu. It consists of stories Cărtărescu wrote for the magazine Seven Nights. Cărtărescu groups it with his earlier books The Encyclopedia of Dragons and Why We Love Women as a trilogy of prose with lower literary ambition.[1] Beautiful Strangers was the ninth best-selling book overall in Romania in 2010.[2]

Beautiful Strangers
First edition
AuthorMircea Cărtărescu
Original titleFrumoasele străine
CountryRomania
LanguageRomanian
PublisherHumanitas
Publication date
2010
Pages298
ISBN978-973-50-2692-9

Writing process

The book consists of texts written for the free-of-charge leisure magazine Seven Nights and Cărtărescu has called it "a little book which I could say wrote itself", since the contract with the magazine meant that "even if you've run out of ideas and inspiration, every week you need to have a topic you've got to write about".[1] The topics for the episodes were inspired by current affairs and a trip to Paris. Cărtărescu aimed to stay within the conventions of the magazine, adopting a literary style less ambitious than in his novels, while avoiding being vulgar.[1]

gollark: Capitalism is why we have a massively effective (okay, mostly, some things are bad and need fixing, like intellectual property) economic engine here which can produce tons of stuff people want. But people *do not care* about diverting that to help faraway people they can't see.
gollark: Helping people elsewhere does mean somewhat fewer resources available here, and broadly speaking people do not actually want to make that tradeoff.
gollark: You don't particularly need that. You can just buy a cheaper phone and give charity £400 or something.
gollark: People might actually look at you as weird if you donate a significant % of your income to effective charities, rather than just £10 a month to WarmFuzzyCharity2000 which helps endangered homeless tigers get food or something.
gollark: As far as I'm aware, you can actually still save lives for something like £500 each by donating money to help with malaria in Africa. But *nobody does this*!

See also

References
  1. Staff writer (2010-09-18). "Writer Mircea Cartarescu". rri.ro. Radio Romania International. Retrieved 2012-02-13.
  2. Staff writer (2011-01-12). "Dan Brown, lifestyle books top sales in Romania". Nine O'Clock. Retrieved 2012-02-13.
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