Books

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.

It’s hard not to read 18% Gray as a love letter to the great American novel. The great American novel as interpreted by a Bulgarian author.

The Tail is a book defined in many ways: a political thriller, an anti-utopia of the present, a parable about the corruption of power. It is above all a conceptual novel. It is no coincidence that it begins with a quote from Plato. It reads lightly and engagingly, not because of the plot, but rather because of Karabashliev’s mesmerizing language, rich without being kitschy, erudite without being intrusive. For any enthusiast on the subject of signs and symbolism, The Tail is a feast.

But this novel is so much more than that, it’s so much more than anything we’ve known before. This novel is about personal and communal wounds, about open and bleeding wounds and the stories behind them. Rather, World War I and the two wars that preceded it are the canvas on which Zachary paints a personal and touching story in detail.

Zachary Karabashliev’s writing is fearless, raw, and beautiful. 18% Gray makes it impossible to look away . . . not that you’d want to.