Chicago Humanities Festival
November 2009
Ms. Kathe Telingator, the long-time producer of
Stories on Stage, has chosen "Buying Lenin" as part of a program for the
Chicago
Humanities Festival. The theme of the festival this year is "Laughter,"
while the program is appropriately titled "The
Cultural Translation of Laughter." BL will be read by a professional
actor
along with stories from Kafka and Chekhov... and as if this is not enough, the
story will be introduced by none other than
Aleksandar Hemon
- only one my favorite writers. I like his stories so much I'm even willing to
overlook the fact that Mr. Hemon is a Liverpool supporter (I'd call him a scouser, but he
comes from Bosnia). Anyway, the reading falls on a Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009.
I was reading
Mr. Hemon's latest collection when this news arrived. There is a story in
there called "Everything" in which the young narrator is sent to the town of
Murska Sobota to purchase a freezer chest for his family. "There arrives a
time in the life of every family," his father says at a family meeting, "when
it becomes ready to acquire a large freezer chest."
I was ten when we acquired our freezer chest, I think in 1992, eight years
after Mr. Hemon's story takes place (we lived, after all, in Bulgaria). For
one year the freezer sat in my room, between my desk and the wardrobe,
unplugged, obstructing my indoor games of basketball with a tennis ball. It
was a fine freezer, my grandfather had used connections to get it, but for a
year we had nothing to freeze in it.
I'm sure that now, as I type this, that same freezer is buzzing ten thousand
miles away from me. I'm sure that in its bottom drawer there is a box of Darko
ice cream I bought two summers ago, awfully frost-bitten now, a box my mom
should have long thrown away. But she throws nothing of mine away. For a month
after I leave she does not wash my blanket, my pillowcase, my sheets. She
keeps my books wherever I drop them, that is, everywhere...
How I wrote it, an essay and an interview
December 2008
When "Buying Lenin" was chosen for inclusion in the 2008 Best American I
was asked to provide a brief description of how the
story came into existence. If you look at the end of the anthology you
will notice that, as usual, the more
established the writer, the longer their
bio, the shorter their description of how the story was written. My
description is absurdly long, but it seems that readers enjoy it, so I decided
to post it here. I've also included some photos of the apartment complexes in
Sofia, where I live, which happened to provide the initial spark of
inspiration.
Also, a few months back Blackbird asked me for another brief essay on the way I write. "Miroslav Penkov," they say on their site, "writes about fear and the myth of the muse. He explores the process of recording a character’s actions and telling a story with honesty, while noting each story’s curious origin and development." You can read the essay here.
And finally, for those of you who read Bulgarian, here is an interview with me in Capital Light, in which I speak, with great gravitas, of the essence of literature, both World and Bulgarian.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
21 August 2008
My
wonderful agent
Sorche Fairbank responded to my original query within hours after I'd sent
it. She loved the sample story I'd attached and ended her request for a full
like so: A story collection can be extremely tough to sell as a first work,
but if I like the rest as I did this one, I'll make sure we can. Well, she
liked it. But she didn't think the collection was ready to go out. So we
edited stories, I wrote two new ones and the manuscript went out to editors.
We waited. And waited. And then it was rejections. Some people were interested
in a novel, others, like Courtney Hodell at FSG, loved a couple of the
stories, but didn't think the rest were up to that level. All editors passed.
Sorche told me to write some new stories and I wrote three more. We worked on
them, then sent the manuscript out for a new round. Sorche told me she'd show
it to Courtney at FSG again. I thought, yes, right, like FSG have nothing
better to do. And guess what happened!!! FSG rejected us again. Two of the
stories, Courtney said, were too sentimental, though she liked the third one.
But I'd written three other stories in the meantime, and they were, well, very
different, so Sorche said, I'll send them to Courtney again. Really? Come on!
I am a negative person, a person who lacks optimism. I'm Bulgarian. So when we
finally got an offer from FSG, two weeks ago, I was amazed, honored, humbled.
And on the inside, a small part of me, cynical and cocky, was like... It's
about time...
2008 Best American Short Stories
February 2008
My
story "Buying Lenin" is featured in
the
2008 Best
American Short stories. And I'm not even American. Once, seven years
ago, after I'd just arrived in the US, my mother asked me in a phone
conversation if I
thought I could start writing in English any time soon. I told her I'd need at
least ten years to even begin to think about writing in English. She said, Ten
years is too long. Start now. So I did. It felt like I was trying to play the
piano with my fingers broken in at least five places. It doesn't feel quite so
bad now.
My story is in there along with stories from T.C Boyle, George Saunders,
Tobias Wolff. I'm sure you'll find it. It's right after Alice Munro...
Full table of contents.
You can hear Salman Rushdie speak briefly of my story on the Leonard Lopate
Show.
2007 Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction
January 2008
My most sincere gratitude to Bret Lott for seeing promise in my stories when
pretty much no one else did. For years all that I'm getting from literary journals
are rejections (mostly form). As an editor of The Southern Review Bret
published two of my stories and I'm so happy to say that the second one,
"Buying Lenin," was awarded TSR's
2007
Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction "given to the best short story published in
The Southern Review each volume year..." Thank you. It's an honor.