Why We Can Touch Everything and Read Nothing Confession: Losing the Ability to Read For most of my adult life I could not imagine existence outside books. Reading was not merely a habit or cultivated taste; it was the environment in which thinking occurred. Books structured time,…

I was nine years old when I first realised that what I was speaking wasn’t simply the Bulgarian language, but something stranger, labelled by the incomprehensible word dialect. I was visiting my cousins in the romantic little town of Kavarna (“romantic” means nothing more here…

The trembling light of the tallow candle – a useful and necessary object, if foul-smelling – mixed with the flicker of the hearth, so that the shadows of the three men, seated on low three-legged stools and taking turns sipping from a bowl of thick bean stew, for which Hristo…

In a house filled with broken toys and forgotten dreams, nine-year-old Anne — called Firecurl for the wild red hair she cannot tame — stumbles into a game far older, and far more dangerous, than it first appears. When a strange model landscape bewitches her and a storm of anger…