About the Book

Distraught over the sudden disappearance of his wife Stella, Zack tries to drown his grief in Tijuana, where he encounters a violent scene, and trying to save a stranger’s life, nearly loses his own. Escaping with the van of his attackers, he makes it back to the U.S., but only to find a bag of marijuana in it.

Using this as an impetus to change his life, Zack sets off for New York with the weed and a vintage Nikon. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. His journey unleashes a series of erratic, hilarious, and life-threatening events interspersed with flashbacks to his relationship with Stella. The story shifts from present day California to Eastern Europe in the late eighties, flows briefly through France, and climaxes in a penthouse above Manhattan.

A suspenseful, darkly funny love story, 18% Gray won both the Bulgarian Novel of the Year Award and the Flower of the Readers Award when it was first published in 2008.

About the Book

After deciding to take a semester off their studies to think about future plans, long-time friends Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus decide to hitchhike to the sea. Boril Krustev, former rock star and middle-aged widower who is driving aimlessly to outrun his grief, picks them up and accompanies them on their journey. It doesn’t take them long to figure out they’re connected to each other by more than their need to travel—specifically through Boril’s daughter, whose actions damaged each of the characters in this novel.

Co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest, A Short Tale of Shame marks the arrival of a new talent in Bulgarian literature with a novel about the need to come to terms with the shame and guilt we all harbor.

About the Book

Albena Stambolova’s idiosyncratic debut novel, Everything Happens as It Does, builds from the idea that, as the title suggests, everything happens exactly the way it must. In this case, the seven characters of the novel—from Boris, a young boy who is only at peace when he’s around bees, to Philip and Maria and their twins—each play a specific role in the lives of the others, binding them all together into a strange, yet logical, knot. As characters are picked up, explored, and then swept aside, the novel’s beguiling structure becomes apparent, forcing the reader to pay attention to the patterns created by this accumulation of events and relationships. This is not a novel of reaching moral high ground; this is not a book about resolving relationships; this is a story whose mysteries are mysteries for a reason. Written with a precise, succinct tone that calls to mind Camus’s The Stranger, Everything Happens as It Does is a captivating and detail-driven novel that explores how depth will never be as immediately accessible as superficiality, and how everything will run its course in the precise manner it was always meant to.

About the Book

Nine Rabbits tells two stories, that of a six-year-old girl, and of her grown-up self: Manda grows up on the Black Sea coast during the height of socialism in the 1960s, raised by her tyrannical grandmother along with her young aunts and uncles. While Grandma Nikula wages open and covert wars with life, Manda lives out the adventures of her childhood under the shadow of her absent grandfather.

Forty years later on, we find that same child has become a woman, now living in a democratic Bulgaria and racked by an identity crisis. Manda has swallowed up her tyrannical grandmother, turning that despotism against herself. In the heroine’s difficult process of awakening, every shattering of childhood matrices frees up space for spontaneity, creativity and love. For Manda, the world gradually transforms into a divine kitchen, where out of a mixture of characters, places, ingredients and situations she creates delicious dishes.

About the Book

Winner of the Vick Foundation Novel of the Year Award in 2007, Party Headquarters takes place in the ’80s and ’90s, during Bulgaria’s transition from communist rule to democracy. The book—which is a love story, a parody, and a thriller about a political hoax—opens with the main character visiting his father-in-law, an old communist party boss who is dying, and being tasked with delivering a suitcase filled with one-and-a-half million euros.

It’s one of Bulgaria’s most popular myths: As the communist party fell apart, officials squirreled away bags of the country’s wealth, and these bags are still circulating, waiting to be delivered to conspirators. But this is just the beginning of the corruption and inequality… While immersing himself in pornography and prostitution, our hero reflects back on his life and the emblematic events that took place—the anticommunist protests, the arson attack on the Communist Party Headquarters, and, most crucially, the Chernobyl disaster.

Beautiful and tragic, Party Headquarters is an engrossing testament to the struggles after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of which continue to resonate today.