Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow - Paperback

by Iana Boukova (Author), Ekaterina Petrova (Translator)

The fates of eight characters in the nineteenth-century Balkans intertwine in this metafictional book of strange quests and nested narratives for fans of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

A woman who reads the future in the faces of her lovers, a dice-player whose unfailing luck becomes a curse, a manuscript illuminator who leaves his monastery to become a most fearsome bandit. Set in the Balkans in the nineteenth century, Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow follows eight characters--all defined by a quest, all marked by a hidden, often torturous talent--whose fates become inextricably interwoven. One of the characters, novelist Ian van Athen, may even be the progenitor of all the rest--although reality has a way of defying fiction, and vice versa, and van Athen soon discovers not even he is immune to the undeniable logic of story, to the twists and turns of his own fate...

Rich with classical allusions and nested narratives that recall the fictions of Calvino and Borges, Iana Boukova's enthralling novel about the pleasures and perils of storytelling appears here in Ekaterina Petrova's masterful translation, and is imbued with all the beauty and unexpectedness of poetry.

The translation of Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow has been made possible with the financial support of the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria, 2024 Translation Program, and in partnership with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.

Author Biography

Iana Boukova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She is the author of two short-story collections and five books of poetry, most recently Black Haiku. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, which received the prestigious Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award, was published in English by Ugly Duckling Presse. Boukova has a degree in classics and has translated into Buglarian Sappho's fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and Pindar's Pythian Odes. She lives between Sofia and Athens.

Ekaterina Petrova holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of lowa, where she was awarded the lowa Arts Fellowship. Her writings and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, EuropeNow, Reading in Translation, European Literature Network, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of lana Boukovas Notes of the Phantom Woman (co-translated with John O'Kane from the Greek) was published in 2024. She lives in Sofia.