Stories from the 90s

1 november, BEE BOP CAFÉ, 18:00
 
Free entry
Stories from the 90s is the third and final volume of the ICU Publishing’s anthology series. After My Brother’s Suitcase and Our Fathers Are Never Really Gone, this new collection of personal stories will access your memories and transport you back to that dynamic, all-consuming and extreme decade. The anthology, selected and edited by publisher and translator Nevena Dishlieva-Krysteva, appears exactly 30 years after November 10th 1989 – the date that made possible this decade full of diversities and extremities. The attendees of Plovdiv Jazz Fest will be the first ones to have this much-anticipated book in their hands.

This anthology allows me to arrange the puzzle of this decade through the perspective of literature – the filter I choose to observe life. To my own perception of the 90s, I’ve added not only the words of those whom I’ve shared those years with, but also the stories of fascinating people, and that’s how we arrived at a colorful, wild, emotionally charged panorama of our recent past, says Nevena.

Come join us to immerse in the whirlpool of stories from the 1990s, told by Angelina Alexandrova, Boris Angelov, Borislav Lazarov, Velina Minkoff, Vesselina Sedlarska, Vesselin Zlatkov, Georgi Gospodinov, Dimitar Kotzev-Shosho, Delyana Maneva, Dessislava Zheleva, Evgeni Dimitrov, Emmy Barouh, Erol Ibrahimov, Zornitsa Hristova, Iva Koleva, Kaloyana Klimentova, Kapka Todorova, Katya Atanasova, Marina Evgenieva, Milena Deleva, Miroslava Katsarova, Mitko Novkov, Natalia Deleva, Petya Kokudeva, Raycho Angelov, Silvia Nedkova, and with the photo-story by the photographer Evgeni Dimitrov.

Stories from the 90s - book cover

What I’ve written is not about Writing/Reading, it is about Pain, about Loss, about the Depth and the Horizon we’ve been deprived of; about the sensation that we’ve been euphoric and emotional while we should have been pragmatic and skeptical. Only we couldn’t. We just couldn’t. Today we don’t know – I don’t know! – what were my 1990s like. What happened to our fragile hopes, to the important and not-so-important matters, to the simple goals we had, what we’ve tried to achieve, what we’ve achieved, where are our words, the words that could have made the things that seemed so important to us.
(Katya Atanasova)

The book launch will take place in Plovdiv, November 1st, 2019, 18:00, Bee Bop Café, part of the Festival’s literary program.

Photography: Evgeni Dimitrov