This post is to serve as a preface to a short voyage to California and on to the Arizona desert...
1 AND AGAIN CHANGED: JOHN WESLEY
2 EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a Bulgarian novel written in English
3 JUST LIKE THAT
4 TRAVELS WITH ELIZABETH
5 FORGET THE FUURE
6 NOTHING DOING
7THE END AND A BEGINNING
8DIPTYCH BEFORE DYING
By making the list I see what I have done... but I also see what has not happened: these manuscripts have not been seen into print.
Of course the fault is mine.
Yet.
Yet.
To even hesitate about: of course the fault is mine
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Most of these manuscripts have been seen by editors---guys like like Richard Seaver, Daniel Halpern, and others whose names... who claimed they admired my work, guys who I knew for more than 35 years at least but the excuse: sales and being dictated to by the sales department... for whatever reason they were not prepared to suspect the books might sell well as happened at DALKEY ARCHIVE, where John O'Brien under-estimated sales and reviews so had to go back to press for GOING TO PATCHOGUE.
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Sections, parts, prepared slides from the following books have been published: FORGET THE FUTURE in BOMB as well as in THE CREAM CITY REVIEW... AND AGAIN CHANGE: JOHN WESLEY in THE NOTRE DAME REVIEW, as was THE END AND A BEGINNING... JUST LIKE THAT--- the opening and the conclusion appeared in THE READING ROOM edited by Barbara Probst Solomon.
AND so, even I, a connoisseur of self-loathing can't go on with this and was thinking of the positive response to the selection from EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS an Bulgarian novel in English that I read at the Bulgarian Consulate in New York City and I will not refrain from mentioning the sort of thumbs-up from Georgia Gospodinov and his wife Biliana Kourtasheva who introduced the reading which lead me to realize that both THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a Bulgarian novel written in English revolve or are instigated by the contemplation of a dead person. PETKOV found a home in both English at Dalkey Archive Press and at Northwestern University Press and even in a Bulgarian journal Svreminik , a "thick" journal much like Novy Mir, the famous Russian journal, upon which it was modeled while EMPTY... is a pile of pages on the desk by which I type this and in a digital form within the machine... but the corpse that launched this manuscript was turned to ashes for which there was no burial site in Upstate New York, while that narrator journeys on the aerial toll-way of a soul within the Orthodox Christian belief looking for a place to... in Bulgaria.
