A scene that should not be possible The scene takes place in Bulgaria, on national public television, in the country’s flagship history program — the equivalent, in local terms, of a BBC prime-time historical roundtable or a PBS flagship documentary panel. This is not fringe…

I wrote this piece back in 2009, in the aftermath of what I can only describe as a silent collapse — the kind that happens not with drama or disaster, but with quiet, daily erosion. At the time, I was a middle-aged father, freshly separated, living abroad, and raising two…

The trembling light of the tallow candle – a useful and necessary object, if foul-smelling – mixed with the flicker of the hearth, so that the shadows of the three men, seated on low three-legged stools and taking turns sipping from a bowl of thick bean stew, for which Hristo…

A Week in Paradise is a sharply observed and darkly humorous account of three Bulgarians arriving in newly reunified Berlin — a city still trembling with history and possibility. The protagonists, Vladko, his brother Boyan, and Vladko’s wife Teodora, form a classic triangle of…