In these pages, you will meet the Collector of Valuable Things (packs of cigarettes, love letters, a magpie’s feather), a private eye at the end of his rope, and a young boy coming to terms, like the rest of us, with the mysteries of his existence.
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Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. A hymn to the city of Sofia, a series of whimsical character portraits, a literary mural of Bulgaria at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Is There Anybody There to Love You? is the first collection of stories from EU Prize-winning author Kalin Terziyski to be published in English. In these pages, you will meet the Collector of Valuable Things (packs of cigarettes, love letters, a magpie’s feather), a private eye at the end of his rope, and a young boy coming to terms, like the rest of us, with the mysteries of his existence. Most of all, you will be introduced to a gifted new writer, whose humanity and humor are reminiscent of Bruno Schulz and Bohumil Hrabal.
Kalin Terziyski was born in 1970 in Sofia, Bulgaria. He earned a doctorate in medicine and practiced psychiatry for several years before becoming a writer. He is the author of several collections of stories and two novels.
"This collection [contains] a subtle sense of humor and depicting larger than life characters. The young author turns life into a new narrative reality, into a new writer’s philosophy. His stories relate to the mysteries of life in the urban space. But the big city in the book is not one we would know so well. It resembles a city in a fairy tale – filled with secrets and drama. It is a big city that offers very colorful theatrical decors, against the background of which deep and strange human drama develops."