The sound of the footsteps – dragging and slow, like someone shuffling their heels across the floor – was driving him mad. Every time they came from above, he would change rooms: from the living room to the kitchen, then through the dreadfully creaky glazed door into the small…

In the personalities of the two great contemporary Bulgarian literary figures, one can glimpse more than individual temperaments. They embody two enduring archetypes of human – and specifically Bulgarian – behavior: on one side, the pursuit of absolute correctness, the anxious…

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…

Chapter one: Deadlock again Rain clouds, dark and puffed-up like turkeys, had been threatening to unleash their wrath on the dreary town all day, but so far had remained all threat and no action, as if to annoy everyone even more. Anne-Firecurl, herself gloomier than even the…