“We had stopped here and there along the way—at important spots, where he had seen a deer for the first time or where he’d had his first kiss. So I didn’t get to see the landscape while it was still light, and now only saw it as elongated shadows that the hills were casting over […]
“The woman walked across the terrace, sat at the table in the dining room, put the bird in her lap, and waited. There was probably something smarter one was supposed to do in such cases, but she didn’t know what it was. She’d heard that when a horse broke its leg, it always got shot. […]
The call for the 12th annual edition of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s Sozopol Fiction Seminars is approaching, with five English-language and five Bulgarian-language fellows to be accepted from applicants that send their materials in by February 25. It’s an incredible program in an incredible place, with everything paid except 50% of travel expenses. This year’s […]
Absinthe: New European Writing #17 – the Bulgarian issue is ready and on the way to subscribers. So subscribe, order it. Besides the work of a lot of great Bulgarian writers I have an essay in it on some recent adaptations that have made it to Bulgaria’s silver screen. I will also soon have some […]
The all-Bulgarian issue of Absinthe will be published in early May. The issue (#17) features writing by Georgi Gospodinov, Milen Ruskov, Emilia Dvoryanova, Vladislav Todorov, Krassimir Damianov, Kristin Dimitrova, Virginia Zaharieva, Vladimir Zarev, Yanitza Radeva, Ivan Dimitrov, Theodora Dimova, Zdravka Evtimova, Dimiter Kenarov, Maria Doneva, Niki Boikov and Stefan Ivanov. There will also be an eight page portfolio of […]
New books, uncertainty, a seminar and why writers should attend readings in their national folk costume There is a lot of new Bulgarian literature available at Three Percent in connection with the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel Contest run by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) and the America for Bulgarian Foundation. First of all, the 2010 winning […]
The second part of an article in Berlin’s Readux on the Literature in Flux program and the river it took place on. Stories of piracy, swimming feats, drowning and love – some true, some fictional and some a combination of the two. What they all have in common is The Danube. Continue Reading Photo – […]
Writers from Germany to Bulgaria take a literary boat trip down the Danube and attempt to explore issues of European identity, the chaotic state of the world and the precarious situation of freelance writers. The Danube runs almost 3,000 kilometers from the Black Forest in Germany all the way to the Black Sea, and has […]
Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West:A Country in Stories, has a post on the official blog of The Story Prize about how when he first arrived in the US, in spite of telling friends he would wait to write in English until he felt comfortable with the language, he began submitting stories written […]
Somewhere there is bound to be a librarian doing their earnest best to classify Miroslav Penkov’s brilliant debut collection of stories East of the West. At first glance it seems fairly straightforward. Penkov is Bulgarian and the book is subtitled “A country in stories” – that country being Bulgaria. Yet the book was written in […]
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