Connect & Create
Plus, My New Book on Preorder!
Disclaimer: This post is primarily for connecting our Book Author profiles on Amazon. If you’re not an Amazon author, please excuse me. Additionally, if you’d prefer not to be tagged in future posts, kindly let me know in the comments. This post also contains information about me, my books, and my latest release, now available for pre-order. If you haven’t already, please consider following our pub, New Literary Society, to connect with us and explore publishing opportunities on Medium and beyond.
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Dear Friends, Writers, and Creators,
2025 hit like a freight train.
My personal and professional life felt shattered; health issues, technological failures — everything seemed to break.
But, staying optimistic, I told myself: “Upgrades, updates, and inner growth.”
Repeating this phrase helped, and now, I’m finally feeling better — about life, work, and even this platform.
Will we return to normal, in work and family life?
Who knows.
What I do know is I’m grateful for the true friends who gave me stability, support, and affection.
Thanks to their support, I kept going — working on our pub’s projects, like the Winter Wonders Contest, writing book reviews, translating a novel, and caring for my family.
A million thanks to our generous supporters for their blessings and love.
Warm regards,
Julia
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About My Books
I’ve been a traditionally published author since 2012.
- My first book? A dragon novel… let’s just say I hate it.
- My second, Anti-Memoriile unei Muze (2016), was much better. It had fragments I’m proud of, many reviews, and I think readers embraced it.
While preparing that manuscript, I quit smoking and started writing romance short stories.
By 2019, I had a full collection of short stories. I promoted some as performance art and hosted events, like in early 2020, just before quarantine closed art galleries, libraries… and the whole world.
- Finally, in 2021, a publisher wrote a foreword and released my short story collection and novel exercises as two e-books. Another publisher later released Cartea Dragostei și a Barfei and Minciuni in Flux Liber in paperback (2023).
Now, the new book I’m referring to is the English version, Book of Love and Gossip.
It’s available for pre-order on Amazon and will soon be in paperback.
I recommend the red-cover version, featuring a male and female mime artist hiding behind a row of armchairs.
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About My Most Recent Book
Book of Love and Gossip is minimalist and reader-friendly, focused on love but… not quite romantic, with some erotic aspects and humor.
Despite the title, there’s no gossip (yet).
It’s occasionally seductive, sometimes cynical.
After reading it, people asked about my orientation — I guess I’m artsexual(?). Well… perhaps I’m exaggerating. And maybe I’m exaggerating even more when I say I have the Florence syndrome. However, I am deeply moved by beauty. Loyalty and spiritual love are incredibly important to me, and living by these values makes me feel fulfilled.
Some say I wrote this book to convince myself to get married — or to express my love feelings better. It also helped me improve my relationship with my parents, especially my mom, who has an oriental background and briefly studied and worked in Japan.
I’m deeply influenced by Japanese literature and was honored to have my work compared to a book written between 990 and 1000 by a courtesan (more on this in the Foreword).
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More About Me — My Amazon Author Profile
Dear authors, let’s follow each other on Amazon!
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My… Book of Love and Gossip Available for Pre-order Now
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And Here is the Foreword for Book of Love and Gossip, Signed by AG
For nearly a millennium, The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon has been one of the most widely read and extensively commented-on works in Japanese literature.
The book was written towards the end of the 10th century, during the Heian period (the name of the period means “peace and tranquility”), during which Japanese literature began to crystallize into its own forms and find its identity. Japan, fragmented and troubled by battles between castes, experienced a brief period of calm.
Finally, people have time for flirting, poetry, and a better life, and the literature, poetry, and graphic arts born in medieval Japan have fascinated Europeans, who discovered an aesthetic completely different from that practiced on the old continent. The scenes of court life are colorful, the observation very precise, the expression concise, and laconic, and the direct tone imparts liveliness.
Sei Shōnagon narrates succinctly, without concern for characters, noting only plastic detail, a gesture, and facial expressions, using an impressionistic technique even in the satirical fragments. What distances this book from contemporary prose is the lack of romantic sentimentality.
Like Sei Shōnagon 1,200 years ago, in the first part of this book, “Japanese Transpositions,” Julia Kalman constructs, with a clear spirit, a lucid judgment, full of spontaneity, humor…, a critical fiction of a society with millennia-old traditions, brought into a present where it gradually loses its cultural values in the attempt to mimic the global spirit and crosstalk.
The second part, titled “European Fantasies,” offers us a glimpse into the lives of characters displaced from their homeland to the countries of Central Europe, such as Germany, while others do not have a clear geographical designation, but the characters are Romanians caught in various situations and life moments, excellently sketched. The author subtly addresses feminism, the follies of youth, ephemeral relationships between the sexes, the accidental pregnancies of young women, or love stories without a happy ending. It is a book written with talent and empathy; the dissection of the scenes gives it an uncomfortable universality, and probably for that reason, there is a lot of smoking in the book, with lit cigarettes between the dynamic dialogues, which makes the reading enjoyable and leave us with a taste of “we want more.”
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And Now, the Preface by Yours Truly
“There is a lot of smoking in the book,” and that’s because I started writing it when I quit smoking. The imagery of dozens of lit cigarettes, the act of puffing, and the eroticism in the early drafts all stem from that experience. At that time, I was writing like crazy, drinking dozens of liters of orange juice, and munching on apples to maintain my figure.
Book of Love and Gossip is the result of a journey exploring femininity. I wanted to include within its covers fragments of events that would allow you to insinuate your thoughts, ideas, and feelings, and which I invite you to bring to fruition.
It is a book meant to contribute to well-being and is full of love, art, exoticism, and travel.
Although it contains many intimate aspects, I tried to construct it in a minimalist style to give it freshness. I needed to free myself from the style of the Anti-Memoires and let writing guide me in a new direction.
I conclude by inviting you to read while enjoying a cake with a coffee.
I embrace you with all my love,
Julia Kalman
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Dear Cherished Book Authors,
Thank you for your unwavering support — it means the world to me. I invite you to follow my Amazon Author Profile and, if you’re interested, connect with each other. Please feel free to clap, engage, and stay tuned for my next story.
Also, if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to create an Author Profile on Amazon Author Central. Readers value knowing more about the lives and work of writers, and it helps us connect.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your encouragement is invaluable.
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Julia Kalman 