Georgi Gospodinov continues his American literary tour with a participation at New York University today, October 19. The Bulgarian writer will be a guest at a meeting at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies in Manhattan, which will be held from 12:30 to 14:00 local time.
The conversation is part of the Eastern Europe Workshop initiative and is organized jointly with the Center for Humanities and the university's programs in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. The event will take place at 53 Washington Square South, on the seventh floor.
Gospodinov's appearance in New York is part of a series of meetings in the United States, accompanying the American edition of his collection The Man with Many Names: Stories. The book was published on October 13 by Liveright, translated by his longtime creative partner Angela Rodel, and collects stories created over three decades. The American edition is 240 pages long, and the literary magazine Publishers Weekly describes it as an impressive collection, in which Gospodinov's characteristic intelligence, humor, and attitude towards Bulgaria are woven through stories about language, memory, loneliness, and the absurdity of everyday life.
Among the texts is “Blind Vaisha“, the story of a girl who sees only the past with one eye and only the future with the other, and thus remains deprived of the present. The story also gained an international life outside of literature. The animated film by Teodor Ushev based on it was nominated for an “Oscar“ in 2017. The new collection also features Gaustin, the mysterious character familiar to readers from other Gospodinov books.
Gospodinov and Rodel's American tour is planned between October 13 and 20 and includes meetings in Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, Washington, New Haven, Brooklyn and New York. The day after the book's premiere, the two visited King's College in Pennsylvania, and on October 15 they presented the edition at Lost City Books in Washington in partnership with the Bulgarian Embassy.
The new book comes at a time of particularly strong international attention to Georgi Gospodinov. In an interview with The Observer, published days after the American premiere, the writer spoke about the feeling of a “pandemic of loneliness“ and about the way in which literature can resist the transformation of nostalgia into a political weapon. This is a theme that also runs through “Time Shelter“, the novel that established Gospodinov among the most recognizable contemporary European authors.
It was Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, that brought the two the International “Booker“ Prize in 2023. This was the first victory for a novel originally written in Bulgarian in the history of the award. The jury singled out the book as a work about memory, identity, aging and the dangerous pull of the past. Gospodinov's work has already been translated into dozens of languages, and Time Shelter also won the European “Strega“ Prize before his triumph with the “Booker“.
The name of the Bulgarian writer also came up in the conversations surrounding the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2026. Shortly before the announcement of the laureate, the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung placed him at the head of its selection of seven possible contenders, which was widely reported in Bulgaria. This year's Nobel Prize was ultimately awarded to the Canadian poet, essayist and specialist in classical literature Anne Carson.
With the American premiere of The Man with Many Names, Georgi Gospodinov returns to the short form, which has occupied a central place in his work since the beginning of his career. The stories collected in the book span nearly three decades of writing and re-enact some of the most recognizable themes in his literature: memory and disappearance, human vulnerability, language and the impossibility of being fully understood, the small stories of Eastern Europe, and the way the past continues to permeate the present.