Mircea Cartarescu (pron: Mer-chay-UH Car-tuh-RESS-cue) was born in 1956 in Bucharest, Romania. One of the foremost contemporary novelists and poets of Romania's 1970s "Blue Jeans Generation," his work was always strongly influenced by American writing in opposition to the official Communist ideology. Cartarescu is the winner of the Romanian Writers' Union Prize, the Romanian Academy's Prize, and the 1992 nominee for the Prix Mèdicis, among other awards. Though his work has been translated widely throughout Europe, his work is rarely seen in English, until now. He currently lives and teaches in Bucharest, Romania.

Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist's childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.