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României literare, 100 Books

The magazine conducted a literary survey to compile a canonical list of the 100 most valuable and representative works of Romanian prose published between 1918 and 2018, including novels, memoirs, and journals. They invited 30 critics, reviewers, and literary historians to participate, asking them to select up to 100 titles each. Some participants listed fewer than 100 titles, while others exceeded this number. In total, 676 different titles were nominated, highlighting a wide range of preferences. Notably, 360 of these titles appeared only once across all the lists. The final selection focused on works that received between 7 and 30 nominations. The editors chose not to publish individual critics' choices or the number of nominations each title received. Instead of ranking the books, they organized the list in roughly chronological order based on the publication year of the selected works, using the earliest published book when authors had multiple entries. The project aimed to propose a canonical collection of Romanian prose from the specified period. The survey was conducted by Sorin Lavric and Cristian Pătrășconiu, with significant contributions from Roxana Chioseolu, who centralized and electronically organized the nominations.

This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.