On Wednesday, June 7, 7pm, we invite you to Tranzit House for the (long-awaited) launch of the short story book "Growing up" by Mihai Mateiu, recently published by Trei Publishing House.
The volume includes four stories about adolescence, with all its discoveries, rebellions, fears and intensity, with the first naive loves, but also with the complicated and difficult ones.
The launch event, moderated by journalist Doina Gecse Borgovan, will be attended by people close to the author, who will talk about how they value the book, starting with a favourite fragment. The guests are: Domnica Petrovai, Alexandru Stermin, Camelia Moraru, Rares Moldovan, Corina Ceclan, Iosif Felvinți and Antoniu Bumb.
There will also be a reading by the author and, of course, a Q and A session.

The end of the event is reserved for autographs and socializing over a glass of wine, provided by Domeniile Franco-Române, or a local gin and tonic from Măgura Zamfirei.
The book will be available for purchase at the launch from our bookseller friends at Cărturești, but you can already find it in bookshops or online.

Mihai Mateiu (born in 1976, Târgu-Mureș) has been working in the organisation of cultural events in Cluj-Napoca since 2004. He founded Someș Delivery, one of the most influential public space projects in Cluj, and Flux Project, a start-up facilitating cultural experiences for company employees. He writes, with long breaks, short prose. Since 2003, his stories have appeared in cultural magazines, in original or in translation. He has been included in the anthologies Az év műfordításai (2008), The Aesthetica Creative Works (2009), Best of: short prose of the 2000s (2013), Der Osten ist eine Kugel (2018), 16 prose writers of today (2018). The volume People, published in 2011, was a bestseller of the Casa de Pariuri Literare publishing house.

"What do we who love literature expect from a book? To tell us a believable story, beautifully written, well constructed, marked by the truth of the characters. To make us begin to believe in the truth of the characters, to take in their joys and sorrows, their enthusiasms and sorrows, their love and hate, to feel what every good book tells us, that our lives are extraordinary too, and that there are characters who miraculously intersect with our destiny and can change it for us. Such characters offer us Growth, reinventing for us the most intense experiences of our lives: childhood, love, disillusionment, hope." Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari

"I don't know how Mihai Mateiu makes and unmakes sentences, but when he puts them on paper (or, more likely, strings them together on his laptop), he takes you completely into his world, crosses an unseen threshold and keeps you there, inside stories that burn from the first to the last page. Reading these mini-novels, it's a kind of sunny, enchanted captivity that you don't want to escape from in a heartbeat. And there's also an intense empathetic experience, an inherent overlap with the characters, even though their literary lives are one and everyone's life is another. For more than ten years, since I read his debut volume People, and especially Grandma Dying - a gem in its own right - I've missed Mihai Mateiu's writing and I'm still waiting for his new book. Now it's here, between these covers, and for me it's such a joy." Filip Floria