How he had knocked, Francine could not guess. But here he was. Or at least here was his head. Floating in the hallway outside her apartment, as if it had wafted over on the aroma of Mrs Singh's stir fry. She recognized the rugged, sunburned face she'd seen on his Match.com profile, except she had imagined it would be attached to an equally rugged, sunburned body. Had it been presumptuous to assume, at the very least, a torso?
Outside it rains, humdrum, but it suits the story. Just one guy is not bothered by the rain drops; he stands on the balcony, smokes and ponders. This is Rag the writer. He has an idea for a new book and longs to share it with some colleague (you know an idea shared is an idea half realised). With this in mind he phones his friend Tag the writer and begins breathlessly to tell him. Ideas splash onto his head one after the other, strong as the Sofia rain.
N. is a writer and is just finishing his first detective novel. Until now, he has always written books that cannot be fitted into a particular genre and thus fall into the category of "literary fiction." This time is no exception. The book is a whodunit, but is more than your usual crime novel: at once funny and serious, wordy and laconic. The main character, as is typical of N., is a writer who is suffering from writer's block while trying to finish his first detective novel and who turns out to be mixed up in a cop's murder, which he perhaps committed, perhaps not.
This is where this month's featured writers Ivan Dimitrov and Ivan Landzhev met their American colleagues Paul Vidich and Lee Romer Kaplan back in 2010 and in 2011.
In the spring of 2012, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation was delighted to provide the opportunity for the writers to reprise their performances in front of new audiences in a new environment, New York City. The Bulgarian Consulate became a stage for the two reunion events.
If they tell you there's no instrument more thankless than the gadulka, you better believe it. There isn't.
The great leader's daughter drowses by the aviary. It is a Sunday afternoon in early autumn and visitors wander through the halls dressed in green and gold. Cheers erupt at intervals from the activity room, where the Packers game plays on the big screen television. The birds in the aviary flutter from branch to branch – canaries, parakeets, finches, lovebirds.
An excerpt
June 6, 1982
David and his father lived alone in a small wooden house in the middle of the woods, which David had decided must be at the very edge of the world. Their home was tucked so far into the mountains that as of yet, after seventeen whole years of life and hundreds of dogged expeditions, the boy had not managed to reach any other inhabited place, nor had he seen another person besides his father.
Tomas insists the new exercises will help.
"Come on!" he yells, "like a clam! Clam!"
And even though his arm movements suggest the opening and closing of a shell, it takes me a moment to understand what he's saying. With his accent, I keep hearing "klum." I lie on my side and, with feet together, very slowly begin to lift my top leg, forming a greater-than sign.
"Come on," he says, "this is not geriatrics. Higher."
"Tomas. It's worse this time."
One day Cupcake stopped showing up altogether. For the last few months they'd seen him less and less oft en on his favorite bench, and when he did turn up, he more or less behaved himself. Finally he disappeared entirely. Had the neighborhood thugs beaten him up? No, they hadn't, or at least nobody had run into him on the street with a black eye or a broken nose, not for months now. Th e neighborhood started getting used to the idea that Cupcake had settled down, that he was sitting at home with his Mattie the Fatty and sobering up.