With their unostentatious mood, Beleva’s stories are like haikus, yet they’re concerned not with the natural world but with our social milieu – the state of familial bonds, familial knots, and familial weight. This book reinvents Bulgarian storytelling!
– Mitko Novkov, Marginalia Magazine
Short Stories, 94 pages, 2018
KEDER
Beleva draws attention to the gaps in Keder – sometimes by creating gaps herself. She shows the silence and the sadness that rage inside a person. In other words, she emphasizes the weight of the words leaking from the cracks. Beleva speaks of being left incomplete, of falling into the world, of small deceptions and soul-searching. She is concerned with the astonishment that life brings; pain gushes out of her stories like lava from a volcano. She frequently looks at the world through the eyes of a child; she sees what is missing, what is lost; she notices those who say they will explain life; those who try to keep memories alive; those who live in memories, those who believe that God is generous; those who dig into their family’s past; those who struggle in the game of life – as well as life’s deficiencies and completions.
– Nurcan Bayram for Pertek Haber, Turkey
Stories from the collection have been published in English translation in The Los Angeles Review, Words Without Borders, Firmament, Two Lines Journal. Two of the stories in Keder are included in the Best Literary Translations 2024 anthology (Deep Vellum). For her work on the collection, translator Izidora Angel has been awarded fellowships by Bread Loaf and the National Endowment for the Arts.