Written with a "formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D." (illage Voice), Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi constructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, and even has a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flâneur named Gaustine. The result is a profoundly moving portrait of communist Bulgaria, in which the "real quest . . . is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation" (Garth Greenwell, New Yorker).
Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature
Finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation and the Strega Europeo