Bruce Benderson was in town last weekend for a couple of great events, the launch of The Romanian at the Horse Hospital, and a well-attended reading at Gay's The Word. Big thank yous to James at the HH, Jimmy and Uli at GTW, to all who came, and to Bruce himself, who is, in case you're wondering, quite excellent company.

There was also a great review of The Romanian in The Times on Saturday:

The Romanian is Romulus, a 24-year-old street hustler picked up in Budapest by Benderson, a fiftysomething Jewish-American journalist. Both, disaffected by cultural exploitation and erotic disorientation, acquiesce in an unsafe, self-deceiving sexual relationship. Benderson's uncontrolled mid-life crisis finds romantic adventure and obsessive focus in his unrequited passion for Romulus, through whom he discovers the chaotic contradictions of a Romania struggling from gothic isolation into global opportunity. This lush, lurid, lyrical, lacerating, sweetly unrepentant memoir won the Prix de Flore.