Zachary Karabashliev

Karabashliev entered Bulgarian literature at the beginning of the century to become part of its renewal and one of its most read writers. His talent as a storyteller is combined with a broad and engaged view of the world. He is a writer who has an eye for the contemporary and for the big canvas of the historical, masterfully interweaving the two perspectives in his novels.

In Havra, Zachary Karabashliev interweaves a gorgeously fictionalized story of Januarius MacGahan, a late 19th-century American war correspondent crucial to Bulgaria’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire, with a painfully realistic pulp fiction tale of 20th-century mafia war after the fall of socialism. With a fresh balance of wit, vulnerability, and fast-paced action, this novel illustrates how the dormant seeds of the past have sown the barren fields of our political and personal present.

Zack takes off on a transcontinental journey with a new camera, rediscovering his passion and undergoing a personal revelation… Karabashliev is fast-paced, quick-witted, and filled with humor in his perspective of a Bulgarian living the drab American Dream.