The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Vagabond, Bulgaria's English Monthly, cooperate in order to enrich the English language with translations of contemporary Bulgarian writers. Every year we give you the chance to read the work of a dozen young and sometimes not-so-young Bulgarian writers that the EKF considers original, refreshing and valuable. Some of them have been translated in English for the first time. The EKF has decided to make the selection of authors' work and to ensure they get first-class English translation, and we at Vagabond are only too happy to get them published in a quality magazine. Enjoy our fiction pages.

This issue presents texts by the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars fellows Garth Greenwell and Bistra Velichkova

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for both the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Greenwell's poetry and prose have appeared in Yale Review, Boston Review, Salmagundi, Poetry International, and Fourth Genre, among others, and he has received the Grolier Prize, the Rella Lossy Award, an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and the Bechtel Prize for his work. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA from Harvard University, where he was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. For the last three years he has lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he teaches at the American College of Sofia.

There's a porousness to these pages, which are written with a kind of fickleness or fecklessness, so that what happens in the present (in my current present, now, before it becomes a more vivid and significant past) as I think these retrospective thoughts can enter, pervade and shift the currents of retrospection. But it's also true that these pages, which accrue so slowly and with such effort, change in their turn the reception of the present, digging channels which determine how new experiences are processed and perceived. Not long ago, for instance, I found myself in Blagoevgrad, in the Pirin mountains, escorting a group of students to a conference on mathematical linguistics, a field in which I have little interest and no expertise. I had long hours, while they were in lectures, to explore the beautiful wooded park near our hotel, which followed a small river three kilometers or so toward the pedestrian city center, a haven of humane architecture almost untouched by the ravages of Soviet-era construction, though blemished here and there by gaudy new buildings, expensive apartments overlooking the river. It was spring, early yet, the asmi were still bare, the wooden trellises built over benches and tables for grape vines to climb, vines which now were still withered and dry; they clung to their wooden supports, vestiges of winter in a landscape already lush with the turned year. The trees were bright with fresh leaves and already obscene with flowers, extravagant and eager blossoms and buds and cones of flowers, a kind of elaborate drunkenness. Our hotel was at the edge of the town, where human habitation made a half-hearted charge further up the mountains, getting nowhere, so that past the hotel's vigorously mowed and always encroached upon lawn there was sheer wildness, impenetrable woods and thickets and, just a little further up, dramatic crags. Even in the park along the river, where I spent my mornings, there was a romantic wildness to the path between the great shorn face of the mountain and the river, which, though small, charged from the peaks, roaring as it beat against rocks already broken in its bed. Walking along that path, wondering at the profusion around me, I felt drawn from myself, elated, entirely engrossed and set free, struck stupidly good for a moment at the extravagant beauty of the world. The air was thick with movement, butterflies and day-moths and also, hanging iridescent in the sun, the tiny ephemerae shining and embalmed, pushed here and there by the light breeze, against the pressure of which they had no recourse, as against the pressure of that other element, time, which bears against us all and to which all of us give way. But the air bore also its inadequate answer to time, the grasses and trees having released in a great exhalation pods of seeds, the little generative grains each sheltered and propelled by a tuft of hair like a parachute or umbrella; they swarmed in my clothes and hair, as in the clothes and hair of everyone walking there, all of us feeling the same elation. I thought, as I stood watching this sowing of the earth, of Whitman, whose poems I had just been teaching to the students now flickering between boredom and interest as they listened to their lectures on mathematical linguistics, lectures they would recount to me over dinner in the little town, telling me also how they imagined my reaction to the arguments made about poetry and the structures of meter and rhyme, their numerical claims on our pleasure. Standing in that path, feeling on my skin the procreant threads seeking purchase, catching on my clothes to be carried who knows where, to what fertile or what barren ground, I thought of lines that had always seemed overreaching to me, audacious and enthusiastic, a source of minor embarrassment on my part and of joy to my students, of delighted laughter, lines in which the whole world stands sharpened to an erotic point, aimed at the poet lain bare before it. They had always mildly embarrassed me, as I say, and yet it was these lines that came to me on the path in Blagoevgrad watching seeds come down like snow, that determined and defined and enriched that moment, language as always interposing itself between ourselves and what we see. What were they, these seeds, if not the wind's soft-tickling genitals, the world's procreant urge; and finally it felt plausible to me, his desire to be bare before that urge, his madness, as he says, to be in contact with it. I felt something of that desire myself, though it was nothing like madness for me in my life pitched almost always beneath the pitch of poetry, a life of inhibition and perhaps missed chances and experiences, but also a bearable life, a life that to some extent I had chosen and continued to choose.