A major North American tour for The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes, in Monica Cure’s English translation
Good news for readers of translated international fiction in the United States! Deep Vellum and the Romanian Cultural Institute New York, a partnership that has already confirmed its strength through several successful projects, are preparing a new major transatlantic literary event: the North American launch tour of the best-known novel by award-winning author Tatiana Țîbuleac.
Already widely acclaimed throughout Europe as one of the most distinctive literary voices of her generation, Tatiana Țîbuleac now arrives before American readers with the English-language publication of The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes, released by Deep Vellum in Monica Cure’s outstanding translation. At once unsettling and profoundly lyrical, the novel moves through the fragile terrain of memory, grief, resentment, and reconciliation, and has firmly positioned Țîbuleac among the most compelling contemporary writers to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years.
Over the coming two weeks, the tour will take the author to Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York for a series of public conversations, readings, and book signings alongside Monica Cure and guests from the American literary scene.
From independent bookstores to one of the country’s most prominent literary festivals, the tour opens a space for American audiences to encounter a singular literary voice whose work has already been translated into more than seventeen languages. Fierce, intimate, and devastatingly moving, Țîbuleac’s writing crosses borders with immense emotional force, bringing contemporary Romanian-language literature into the center of today’s international literary conversation.
The tour is organized by Romanian Cultural Institute New York and Deep Vellum with the support of The Wild Detectives, Bay Area Book Festival, Madison Street Books, Lost City Books, and Rizzoli Bookstore.
PROGRAM
Dallas — The Wild Detectives
Tatiana Țîbuleac in conversation with Monica Cure, moderated by Will Evans
May 28, 7:00 PM / RSVP
San Francisco — Bay Area Book Festival
Tatiana Țîbuleac in conversation with Rita Bullwinkel
May 31, 1:30 PM / RSVP
Chicago — Madison Street Books
Tatiana Țîbuleac in conversation with Monica Cure
June 1, 7:00 PM / RSVP
Washington, D.C. — Lost City Books
Tatiana Țîbuleac and Monica Cure in conversation with Ena Selimović
June 3, 7:00 PM / RSVP
New York — Rizzoli Bookstore
Tatiana Țîbuleac in conversation with Monica Cure
June 4, 7:00 PM / RSVP
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tatiana Țîbuleac is a celebrated Moldovan-Romanian writer and the award-winning author of The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes and The Glass Garden. Born in Chișinău, Moldova, she began her career in journalism, working in print media and as a reporter and news anchor for PRO TV Chișinău, Moldova’s leading independent television station. She later worked with UNICEF in Moldova before moving to Paris, where she currently lives.
Her literary debut came in 2014 with a collection of short stories, followed by two novels that have received multiple awards, including the 2019 European Union Prize for Literature for The Glass Garden. Her books have been translated into 17 languages.
ABOUT THE SUMMER MY MOTHER HAD GREEN EYES
Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to leave childhood behind and escape a family still marked by the grief of his sister’s death years earlier, those slow months in the countryside feel almost unbearable. Then his mother tells him she is dying.
Fourteen years later, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Aleksy returns to that summer in memory. What follows is a re-examination of a moment when everything shifted, and of the emotions that resurfaced in that small French village where mother and son were forced, briefly, into an uneasy closeness.
For readers of Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante, this is a novel of reconciliation: three months in which mother and son gradually lower their defenses, attempting — however imperfectly — to make peace with each other and with themselves.
The Summer My Mother Had Gree Eyes, reviewed by The New York Times: Why Does This Teenager Hate His Mother So Much?
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright award recipient. A former refugee, she grew up in the Detroit area and studied creative writing at Kenyon College, later earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California.
Her poetry has been published in international literary journals, and she is the author of Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (2018). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.
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