The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceausescu's Romania

A Nobel laureate presents a brilliant, discomfiting reflection on literary life defined by the brutality of Ceausescu’s Romania.

From her childhood in Romania, in a village “as small as a thimble on the edge of the world,” through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory, and trauma, and on what it was to live and write u...