2018 On Sale at Librărriile Cărturesti, Delfin, Diverta, Elefant.ro, etc. Buy it here from Carturesti.
Winner of the Bucharest Writers Association Award, second and revised edition after the death of Sam Shepard in 2017.
SAM SHEPARD: Rebelul Rigorii Mortale, Tracus Arte.
2012The novel MY LIFE ON CRAIGSLIST is now available in Romanian translation as VIATA MEA PE NET, published by POLIROM in Bucharest. It was in Top 10 Polirom for
Paperback for 3 weeks and in top 10 Polirom for e-books for 19 weeks.
VIATA MEA PE NET e de vânzare în toate librăriile din țara, și in format E-book pe Polirom.ro si Elefant.ro
(Originalul in engleza este disponibil pe Amazon.com, BN.com, ITunes.com si IndieBound.com)
Featured in the Diverta-Polirom Chic Summer Campaign 2012
Glossy magazines: Elle, Cosmopolitan, Tabu, The One, Flacara, BWhere, BFresh, etc.
TV Romania Cultural and Digi 24 TV Morning Show
Radio Gherilla, Radio Romania Libera & Radio Lynx, Radio Romania International English, Radio Romania International Romanian, Radio Romania Actualitati, Radio Romania Cultural (Vorba de Cultura)
National dailies: Romania Libera, Adevarul, Evenimentul Zilei.
Many thanks to my genius PR whiz Claudia Fitcoschi!
Many thanks to Viorel Onutu for the photos.
FRUMOASA ADORMITA SI TREZITA/WAKING BEAUTY; Bi-lingual edition (Romanian/English), @2006.
A modern tragedy, a social vaudeville, and
indirect a political play with an absurd and neo-feminist touch, coming from
the tradition of Bertold Brecht’s Three
Penny Opera, Wendy Wasserstein’s Heidi
Chornicles and David Hare’s Amy’s
View. Alexandra Ares’s play is the tale of Onda, the study of a young girl’s quest for the
right man and her own truth, and the changing aspirations and power of women in the
last 20 years. The
play begins
right after the fall of communism and ends 15 years later in New
York, tracking Onda’s life
in three acts, every seven years, from 1990 to 1997 to 2005.
The play makes a parallel study of the ‘moment zero’ in the life of a young
woman and that of a brand new post communist society, and all the trouble that
follows. It revolves around the dynamic between Onda and her
changing choices as a woman, innocence (in the first act), lust and sin (in the
second act), redemption and staying true to herself regardless of what that my
cost (in the third act.) The plot is driven by Onda’s love choices and her
relationship with Paul, her conventional rich husband, Keev, her eccentric
lover, Jack, her best friend, and Sam, her alter ego in New York. The play also
explores the power, traps, and limits of Beauty, which ultimately is in the eye
of the beholder.
“WAKING BEAUTY is a
mature, ironic and painful synthesis of the female experience. It is a vaudeville
where everyone is cheating on everyone. A play about the eternal search of
fidelity in love and about the eternal
stray from it. About the Prince Charming that girls dream about and the real
Villain that often fascinates and disappoints women. About the instability of
the borders between good and bad, Villain and Prince Charming. The playwright is staging everything on the
background of the beautiful fairy tale...that she is unraveling of all
implications and transforms a fairy tale into a foray into sexual instability
in contradiction with the need for stability in life. This is a very old theme
but Alexandra Ares is writing about it in a very original manner with insolence,
innocence and gravity." Mircea Ghitulescu, History of Romanian Literature, Drama.
page 813.
A novel about love,
uprootedness, friendship, hope and deception, Dream Junkies presents
an America where the chimera chase painfully contrasts with the difficult
realities of life. Kitty Roman and Desert Rose, the two main characters of the
novel, take us on a fascinating journey through the heart of the American Dream,
from New York, filled with intellectual and artistic elites, to glamorous Los
Angeles with its movie stars and jetsetters. Although they have
different backgrounds, hopes and ambitions, at the end of the road they find the
same thing: true love. A page turner in which self irony and lucidity blend
wonderfully with lyrical interludes, Dreams Junkies, offers the reader
a "deconstructed" view of the American dream. (Novel EN/RO, Published at Polirom
Publishing House, Bucharest.)
The string of American adventures
that the Romanian Alexandra Ares is devouring in her book, DREAM JUNKIES, has
something of the European interwar flavor and mystery described by the
Anglo-saxon writers of that era - Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce,
Ernest Hemingway or Getrude Stein – with the air of transmitting la live report
about the boredom of being wealthy, of loving always unhappy, of living among
artists as to better learn sadness. Just that this time, the roles have
reversed: an Eastern European writer discovers America…. She is a sensitive,
romantic and sometimes cynical writer, but surely courageous, who is facing out
and confronting the “American Dream†from the perspective of the Eastern
European liberated from the claws of communism, and periodically haunted from
its ideological ghosts. Ion Cochinescu, award winning novelist and critic
