Programata

"To show the good literary taste" - that's how the King of Sweden himself explained in 1786 the purpose of the Academy, which later started giving out the Nobel for literature. In 2018 the purpose is quite the same, only the taste is bitter over one of the more quiet #MeToo scandals. After a man from the Academy has been accused, the comitee has decided not to give out the prize for this year. Since we're still excited to hear book recommendations, we ask a few people in love with reading who they'd recommend for the prize, if they had the chance.

New children's books by Aldous Huxley, Stephen Hawking and Roald Dahl.

We stopped calling him just Murakami since the contemporary artist Takashi with the same surname became too famous. Haruki is the bigger artist - with words and symbols he draws a parallel universe that is very similar to ours (with its chilly interpersonal relations, for example), but different from it with its magical plots. 17 of them, written in the 80's and 90's, were just released in Bulgarian in The Elephant Vanishes.

It doesn't matter if you're stacking luggage or a library, the time for a new book is always good. But now - especially because six titles of the highest shelf of world literature already tell stories of rage, slavery, suppressed sexuality and love for deep seas and invisible cities.

If you have already sat down on one of the benches that have taken shape from the Cyrillic alphabet, you have literally felt the common plane between typography, literature and urban thinking. We're now walking to three of their addresses in the city, while we're talking about the Hidden Letters with one of the curators of the project, Todora Radeva.

After two novels, poetry books, essays, plays and even a graphic novel, Georgi Gospodinov is returning to the short stories of his first book Lapidarium with All Of Our Bodies - a collection of 103 supershort stories, in which we read a little something about ourselves.

The formula of the Night of Literature is known, and this year its numbers are as follows: from 6 to 10pm on May 9 19 recently translated books are read out loud at 19 locations in the city.

Not that anyone will stop you at the door, but from April 18 to April 22 the Youth Theatre's doors are wide open especially for the youngest book fans with the first International Literary Festival for Kids and Youngsters.

His book Life, seen from below, is coming out in Bulgarian and the story inside is following the sidewalks of Sofia - so we now come after the footsteps of  "one of the most rewarded contemporary Belgian authors" to know him better before seeing him live in January.

The National Palace of Culture has just revealed its facade to welcome guests to the Book Fair and the Sofia Literary Festival. We are now entering the hall for a while and highlighting several accents in both programs, which go hand in hand from December 12th to 17th.

In the 30s, Zelda Fitzgerald says he wants to write a beautiful book to break the hearts that will soon cease to exist - "a book of faith and small neat worlds, and people who live on the philosophy of popular songs." Zelda by Elin Rahnev sounds like this book.

If you are looking for a good travel company in the summer, these seven books are just coming out of the printing press with a thumbs up of the press critics and pages from all over the world - from magical realism in Indonesia to the war in Afghanistan, the zombies in Haiti, the problems of a small Irish town and the pain of being a woman.

You don't need an extra hour a day, if you rule the space in your head. That is what expert on human efficiency David Allen preaches in his "manual" Getting Things Done that has been teaching the world productivity tricks for 10 years.

So far, we know two things - that he is the author of the technology anti-utopian novel The Circle and that on July 5th he'll be in Sofia. We like to get prapared for an important meetings like this one, so now we are opening Eggers' biography. What we find there are more than ten books (including humorous science), a serious journalism and a dramatic family story.

"We live so fast that we often have to be motivated to write from outside," says Irena Ivanova, whom we know as a poet, theater director and an actress. Today, however, we are talking to her about her new project, The Creative Academy Rabbit Hole, which pushes the writer to fall down into the country where the words live.

If the bottom-up cultural development strategy already means something, you should definitely continue scrolling - Peter Jenkinson and Sheila Wright are the lightest bulbs in the field of cultural management who share a piece of experience with us on May 11 and May 15.

The covers on this page are the best for 2016 according to the Academy of British Cover Design or ABCD. If you feel the heavy air of authority, stay with us a bit more: these awards are actually some fresh air that the publishing needs to breathe freely.

Young photographer Yana Lozeva is pointing her lens at contemporary Bulgarian art and the result is the new 150-page magazine Svema which captures the light in our culture in different perspectives as seen by our brightest authors and artists.