Description

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A radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, from an essential voice in world literature.



Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature • Finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation and the Strega Europeo

Published a decade before his International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow has become an underground cult classic. Finding strange solace in the myth of the Minotaur, a man named Georgi reconstructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. With profound wit and empathy, he catalogues curious instances of abandonment, spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene; recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, spent mostly in a basement; and charts a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flaneur named Gaustine. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, and exhibiting his signature audacious style, this expansive work affirms Gospodinov as “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).

About the Author

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Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria’s most lauded authors. His novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo, among other prizes.

Angela Rodel is a prolific translator of Bulgarian literature and won the International Booker Prize for translation.

Praise For…

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For all Gospodinov’s obsession with sorrow, he is a trickster at heart, and often very funny.
— Garth Greenwell - The New Yorker

There are very few novels that appear to a seasoned reader as utterly original: The Physics of Sorrow is one of these rare books.

— Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading