The Man With Many Names: Stories

From the International Booker Prize–winning Georgi Gospodinov comes a volume of his finest short stories gathered over three decades.

Exhibiting a world-renowned author at his most playful and profound, The Man with Many Names captures the peculiarities of existence across forty tales set in and around his beloved Bulgaria, in and around this fading world.

On a train through the poppy-laden Balkans, strangers spend their time sharing stories only to be lost in translation. A lonely drifter becomes convinced he’s on television one frigid New Year’s Eve, his every move suddenly watched by millions. A girl born with two different eyes—one seeing only the past, the other seeing only the future—strives for the unattainable. A father hangs laundry between two cherry trees and sets off an absurd and historic series of events. What can we do in the last minutes of a dying sun? How will we recognize the faces from the final days? Lingering between these pages is a flaneur named Gaustine, a familiar trickster known to longtime Gospodinov fans.

The Man with Many Names echoes boldly through time and place, all the while remaining uncannily attuned to the profound nature of human connection—how one person’s single gesture can ripple through another’s life like fate. Masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, this is another wildly inventive contribution from “one of the indispensable writers of our times” (International Booker Prize Jury).

Praise for Georgi Gospodinov

“A major voice in international literature.”

International Booker Prize jury

“Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. I’ve been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination, and perfect writing technique like he can.”

Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize–winning author of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

“Gospodinov’s work is time-bound and time-free, haunted by time and fleeing from it.”

James Wood, The New Yorker

“Mr. Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria’s most popular contemporary writers, is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction.”

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A writer of great warmth as well as skill.”

Patrick McGuinness, Guardian