First off, here’s one that the author of the recently published

Here’s Steven’s description of the book:

Angel Igov’s first book to be translated into English, A Short Tale of Shame, is a compact road trip novel with an even more compact story line. Boril Krustev, former rock star in Bulgaria and current businessman, has lost his estranged wife to death and his estranged daughter, Elena, to America. Adrift and in mourning, he picks up three hitchhikers embroiled in a complex ménage à trois: the headstrong ringleader Sirma, her friend Maya, and their young male paramour Spartacus.

The four wander to a beach, camp, find a hotel. Not much ostensibly happens, but the novel finds its richness in multiple layers of history. We see the threesome’s past, considered both individually and through their connections to Elena—which are not always pleasant and sometimes painful. We see Krustev’s past, longer and more full of regrets for things undone. We see the pasts of the hitchhikers, not quite sure how they got from there to the present. And we also see the history of Bulgaria, both in its recent transformation from Communist rule and in its deeper sense as a small country that has always been overshadowed on the world stage by bigger, louder neighbors.

These strands of history tie together with an ending that arrives with great tenderness and momentum, breaking live a perfect wave. Among the novel’s strongest points is Igov’s control of language—aided and abetted by translator Angela Rodel—that announces, from its very beginning, a seriousness of intent and a deep awareness of craft.

Steven Wingate: There’s also an old Europe/new Europe vibe to A Short Tale of Shame that shows up in a consistent discussion of ancestry—the distinctions between Phrygian, Daican, Thracian, Slavic, Illyrian, Macedonian. This suggests a Balkanization that runs even deeper than what we see on the recently redrawn maps of the region. Why is this important to the unfolding of your story, as well as to Europe today?

Angel Igov: Balkanization is a trend that the West has always been afraid of and thus relegated to the periphery of the continent. What’s more Balkanized than today’s Belgium, for instance? The term also masks the huge role the Great Powers played for the fragmentation and ethnic trouble of Southeast Europe, from the mid-19th century to the Kossovo crisis. A Short Tale of Shame draws a map that ironically reflects Western stereotypes of the region. To this day, many well-educated westerners would be hard pressed to tell the difference between Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, for instance. Then why not call them Thrace, Dacia, Illyria, whatever? Would it matter anyway? The attitude would remain the same: far away countries of which we know little, as Neville Chamberlain nicely described Czechoslovakia after signing the Munich treaty. [. . .]

SW: You’ve translated into Bulgarian a number of great writers familiar to English-speaking readers—among them Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. I imagine that the creative influence of writers you’re translating goes beyond what you get from merely reading them. How does that translation experience show up in your work?

AI: I love translation: it’s a pure craft, transposing linguistic material from one language to another, molding words and sentences with your own “hands.” So, first of all, translation makes you good with language, or so I hope. Style, sound, texture—these things are important to me when I write.

Then, of course, it is difficult not to be in some way influenced in your own writing by what you translate. The anxiety of influence is a common malaise of authors. However, if you channel it and manage to create original work even when getting inspiration from other authors, this can be a very useful and joyous experience. After all, no writer is an island; you work in a huge, huge network of texts. At various times Paul Auster or Ian McEwan, or Martin Amis some years ago, have been important to me as models of sorts. However, I don’t think I’ve ever imitated anyone—I just don’t find this interesting. And I also try to make each book of mine different from the previous one.

SW: Fans of the American and European experimental traditions will recognize some of what you do stylistically—your long paragraphs, for instance, and your choice to not use quotation marks for dialog but to fold into your narration seamlessly. What are some of your models for that kind of dialog?

I could name two very different authors: John Banville and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At one point I realized Jose Saramago was also doing a similar thing. Certainly the lessons of high modernism were also important for me here, Virginia Woolf, for instance. The funny thing is when I started writing this novel, the paragraphs and the dialogue weren’t in any way extravagant, but it just didn’t work: straightforward storytelling had to me a weird tongue-in-cheek quality. I decided to skip the dialogue markers and let the sentences flow—so they flowed on. I like the effect of smooth continuity: after all, when we speak, our utterances are not isolated in quotation-mark cages or comic-book balloons, they are all the time intermingled with our own thoughts that we keep to ourselves even while speaking, we get interrupted by others and so on. For me, this way of writing is not in any way literary: on the contrary, it is much closer to what we do in the real world. I am working now on my next novel (which is set at the end of World War II) and, after some consideration, I chose a similar approach.

Be sure and read the whole thing here.”:http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/all-times-are-awake-at-once-an-interview-with-angel-igov

and should not be confused with Anne Tenino’s and looks like this:

Anyway, Zack’s book, which was the co-winner of the 2012 Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest (sponsored by the ever-wonderful ) and which is a really fun, enjoyable, occasionally heart-wrenching book about a man, a camera, a cross-country road trip, a missing wife, and a huge bag of week, has been getting a lot of praise, including

The world is full of bartenders hoping for something grander — actors waiting for their first big part, musicians waiting for their first big hit.

In San Diego there’s a bartender who is already a big deal. In Bulgaria.

His name is Zachary Karabashliev. He’s 44. He lives in Mira Mesa and mixes drinks at the Sheraton downtown, where it seems fair to say not many people know that back in his homeland he’s a prizewinning novelist, short-story author and playwright.

Now he’s poised to make a splash here. [. . .]

Voted by Bulgarian readers one of their favorite 100 books of all time, 18% Gray opens in a fictionalized San Diego. The main character, also named Zack, has a newly broken heart. Drowning his sorrows in Tijuana, he escapes a kidnapping and winds up with a 60-pound bag of marijuana in his car trunk.

The best person he knows to help him unload the pot lives in New York, so he sets off across the country on a journey that’s wildly dangerous and oddly healing. His car gets stolen, rear-ended, towed for a parking violation. He drinks a lot of espressos and dirty martinis, takes a lot of photographs. He helps a suicidal woman. He accidentally goes into the wrong motel room and climbs into bed, startling the occupant. Who has a gun.

All that’s interspersed with flashbacks to his life with Stella, an artist he fell in love with in Bulgaria and eventually married. And then she left him.

If the story sounds absurd and darkly funny — well, it is. Sitting one recent morning in a cafe in University Heights, Karabashliev admitted he has a healthy appetite for both.

Additionally, Steven Wingate interviewed Zack for

SW: The author bio mentions that you’ve written a screenplay for 18% Gray, which is in development. The novel has its cinematic elements, most obviously its use of third person present tense narration. Yet you break completely from the cinematic model in other ways—something I think is crucial for fiction writers to do because the cinematic aesthetic is so omnipresent that it threatens to engulf everything else in narrative culture. In what ways do you see yourself embracing or distancing yourself from the cinematic?

ZK: It’s funny how after cinema adopted the rules of millennia of storytelling and practically hijacked the “hero’s journey” (the monomyth) now, we fiction writers have to deal with and challenge that. Cinema replicates narrative tradition with new means, but in terms of storytelling it has not invented all that much.

The feedback from my readers unanimously touches on the cinematic aesthetic of the novel. “It was like I was watching a movie,” “I read it in one day,” and so on. And I take that as a compliment. I guess that was also the appeal for the producers to buy the film rights and trust me with writing the script. I love film. But 18% Gray was conceived and constructed as a novel. It was not meant to be a surrogate for a movie. Even though I employ techniques from screenwriting, and at times borrow from the visual arts, I am not an advocate for the “show don’t tell” doctrine that has dominated the craft of too many fiction writers for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years.

Our civilization today is ruled by the visual, and this is normal—nearly a third of our brain is dedicated to vision. Through brain scanning, neuroscience and linguistics research shows that while reading words, we use the same cognitive tools that allow us to react to our environment, reconstruct memories, and so on. So if you want to be “heard” as a writer, you need to “show” more. Great, but that makes us, storytellers, compete with visual artists (especially film makers) for the mercy of the almighty Visual Cortex. Well, what about Proust then? Dostoyevsky? James Joyce? What about Kundera, or Robert Pirsig, or a long line of writers that like to not just show, but tell us what they think about things?

I like “show and tell.” Looking back now, I think I have used certain cinematic approaches to bribe the reader’s attention, to suspend disbelief and hold attention to the words. I never take my reader’s attention for granted. I always feel I have to fight for it.

The interview is definitely worth reading in its entirety—especially the opening sequence about when Steven first met Zack,

a man in denim jumping up and down with infectious excitement and energy. He looked about my age, with a bit of gray at the temples—just old enough to have done the pogo at a punk rock show back in the day—and he exuded the kind of vibe it’s almost impossible to be downhearted around

Additionally, you should Actually, since I’m feeling really good about the attention we’ve been receiving for A Thousand Morons and 18% Gray, if you we’ll throw in both of these books for free—you’ll received 12 books for $100.

(And if you’re already a subscriber and have one or both of these, we’ll just extend your subscription for an additional two titles for re-upping now.)

This will only last through February though, so sign up now!