In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sofi Stambo, an award-winning Bulgarian-American writer whose collection of short stories People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, will be published by Restless Books in May. Here’s a description of the book:
A nervous dog takes flight over Manhattan. A woman soothes her neighbors with multilingual telepathy. A purse snatcher inherits her victim’s scribbled lists—and her worries. In these stories, immigrants to New York City work their way through absurd situations into even messier ones, communing with their fellow diners, officemates, and the local cemetery geese, and greeting chaos with a grin. From Bulgaria to America, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much pulls at the threads of daily life, unwinding the ordinary into scenes of hilarity, introspection, and surprising connection.
As soon as I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.
We spoke about where Sofi’s stories come from, if anywhere. She had beautiful things to say about that.
I learned that Sofi, like me, loves Kurt Vonnegut, and that Vonnegut was one of the few contemporary American writers translated into Bulgarian during the communist era…. and that she almost saw him speak in New York.
We touched on the importance of translation. Translation doesn’t just mean stories find new audiences. Translation also means looking at a story anew, finding hidden meanings in a story, looking at a story anew, even transforming a story. Sofi has translated some of her stories to Bulgarian, and she told me how they took on a new character in the process. While on the topic of translation, Sofi shared how she once mistook JD Salinger for his Bulgarian translator!
Many interesting stories just come out of nowhere.
We talked about the role of superstitions, legends, sounds, smells, in her writing. And about something Beckett-like about her writing, how the people in her stories are always waiting for something bigger and better that just doesn’t come, and if it comes, it comes too late for them, or they’re not included. And about what Sofi thinks about advice writers often hear like “show, don’t tell.” And much, much more.
A little more about Sofi:
She won the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature in 2024 with her story collection People Who Live Alone Talk To Much, which will be published in May this year by Restless Press. She was awarded the 2024 LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her stories have been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Rumpus. Sofi has a master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria and she was a graduate student in Literature at City College, New York.
Learn more about her and, above all, read some of her work at www.sofistambo.com.
Sound credits
Political (loop) by AudioCoffee -- https://freesound.org/s/718891/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
comical beat r17u by Setuniman -- https://freesound.org/s/126667/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
