THE NEW WORKER - By James Wood, 2025 A Bulgarian Novelist Explores What Dies When Your Father Does Writing about a son’s vigil at his dying father’s bedside, Georgi Gospodinov examines what parents and their children reap and sow. Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose
THE NEW YORK TIMES: What if We Could Relive Our Golden Ages? One of the more promising treatments for dementia has been "reminiscence therapy", which employs artifacts and photos to improve mood and awareness. Some have even built "dementia villages", which recreate settings from patients’ younger days: movie theaters, diners, bus stops. While proponents claim such environments bolster patients’ humanity, others have criticized them
THE NEW YORKER, 2015 The Bulgarian Sadness of Georgi Gospodinov By Garth Greenwell In December, 2010, The Economist published an article on "the geography of happiness" which declared Bulgaria - at that time (along with Romania) the newest, and perhaps most maligned, member of the E.U. - "the saddest place in the world". Almost exactly a year later, Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s best-known
THE NEW YORKER, 2005 Gospodinov’s anarchic, experimental début concerns a young writer, the narrator, whose marriage breaks up after his wife becomes pregnant by someone else. But this plot is little more than the framework for a lively assortment of fragments—dreams, lists, projected attempts to write a novel entirely with verbs or a Bible for flies, and a chapter called “Towards a Natural History of the
TONY`S READING LIST - Review by Tony Malone The Story Smuggler (translated by Kristina Kovacheva and Dan Gunn) is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s personal take on youth, writing and the untranslatable concept of Тъга (‘taga’), a sense of melancholy that pervades his native land. Over twenty-five brief chapters, he examines his life and career, allowing the reader a glimpse into young Georgi’s experiences behind the