Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow - by Iana Boukova Paperback

Book Synopsis

The fates of eight characters in the nineteenth-century Balkans--including an unfailingly lucky dice player and a manuscript illuminator turned bandit--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.

About the Author

Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet and writer. She is the author of two short story collections and five poetry books, most recently Black Haiku. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, which received the National Award for most outstanding book of Bulgarian poetry, was published in English by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2024. Boukova has a degree in Classics; she is the translator into Bulgarian of Sappho's fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and The Pythian Odes by Pindar. She lives between Sofia and Athens.

Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator from the Bulgarian and a bilingual nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, Reading in Translation, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of Iana Boukova's poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman (co-translated with John O'Kane from the Greek) was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2024. Her translation of Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow was supported by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, Art Omi, the National Centre for Writing, the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.