Georgi Gospodinov

every last one of us writing, unmarried, and unpublished

A city that is good for living and even better for dying.

A city quiet as a grave.

Here Canetti, Joyce, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, and even Thomas Mann have been bored. I

Isn’t it strange, Gaustine once said to me, it’s always other people who are dying, but we ourselves never do

in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs. (I could never do that.)

Oh, how crucial it was back then to have a father or uncle who drove a semi, who went to that obscure country known as “Abroad

Does the past have an expiration date . . .

(The truth is, Switzerland is the ideal country due to its “time degree zero.”

If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?