Beatrice Faurescu was born in Bucharest, where she read law at the American University. Her early career unfolded over the course of a decade in the legal and compliance departments of European financial institutions — a profession that left her with a lasting sense of how carefully and how painstakingly a civilization is made to hold together.
In 2013 she departed Europe for the United States, where she undertook a master’s degree at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University — that singular institution, devoted to the serious study of the relations between peoples and between nations, in which one finds assembled from every continent the sort of companions who remain, for the rest of one’s life, the most vivid one has known. Three years passed in Newton, Massachusetts, and her summers were spent along the old New England coast — the quiet of Cape Cod, the polished dignity of Newport — among the white clapboard houses and the wind‑bleached promenades where the Gilded Age still keeps its faded accounts with the sea. Paradoxically, it was precisely there, amid the beauty of another continent’s seaside ease, that her longing for Europe deepened rather than eased.
She has since made her home in California, where a long‑held idea has at last begun to take its present shape — the dream, kept quietly through many other working lives, of one day giving herself to the making of books.
A lifelong reader, she grew up inside books and has kept her house full of them. Writing has likewise been her daily instrument: law is a profession of careful sentences, and a decade inside it is a decade of writing; earlier still, in her youth, she worked as a freelance translator between Turkish and the legal languages of the profession she was then preparing to enter. The present work — adaptation, editing, publishing — belongs to the same long habit.
That such a contribution should now be possible on the scale of a single publisher — rather than requiring the resources of a commercial house — is one of the quieter blessings of the present age.
A linguist by temperament and a polyglot by long habit, she moves with ease between English and her native Romanian; speaks Turkish, first embraced in youth through a fascination with the imagined Orient; has given five years of disciplined study to Italian, reaching an advanced command; and has more recently begun French.
Across these languages, her interest is constant: not in utility, but in the older literary worlds they preserve — where language remains a bearer of memory, of continuity, and of form.
Her adaptations are composed in English, from the originals of the languages she reads closely — as in the case of the present Ispirescu edition, written from the Romanian and thought, by her, in English. For traditions and tongues beyond her own, she will collaborate with translators, authors, and illustrators whose sensibilities are in harmony with the imprint’s.
Lido House Editions was founded in 2025 as a small, independent imprint — the expression of a long‑standing conviction that certain books are too important to let quietly slip from the shelves, and that certain voices from the European literary tradition deserve to be restored with care. It is a further conviction of the house that such works, drawn as they are from differing cultures and differing tongues, are better served by adaptation than by translation: the living bridge between one culture and another is built less by literal fidelity than by an ear attuned to what a work, in its own language, was trying to say.
The name of the publisher is an homage to the Lido of Venice, and to the stillness of Thomas Mann’s great meditation on beauty and its passing.
Beatrice Faurescu is the founder of Lido House Editions.
Her literary work is published under the name Beatrice Zapodeanu.
By intention, a modest endeavor.
A small addition to a larger, ongoing act of remembrance.