Sofi Stambo won the 2024 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature with People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, a collection of 34 short stories that highlight warm, humorous, poignant details of quotidian lives lived between Bulgaria and Brooklyn. Her daughter, Yana Mihaylova, enhances every story with black-and-white drawings, sometimes just a few lines that capture crossed legs, others that present architecturally intricate cityscapes.
Born in Bulgaria and relocated to New York, Stambo mines her own experiences into vulnerable fiction. Feeling that she's no longer quite Bulgarian, not quite fully American, Stambo transforms that liminality into an outsider's insight. In the opening "Spying in Manhattan Diners," the narrator and her boyfriend share lunch, all the while sharply observing both staff and customers--"fragile" owner George, the $4.75/hour grumpy and arthritic waiters, out-of-towners who ask for pics but won't leave a tip, the Guy Who Waits who gets an earful before his takeout order is finally ready. In the title story, the narrator is one of three "paper pushers" who dream of someday boarding the Caribbean Princess that glides by every Friday at 5:05 p.m. In "Ponchiki for the Fine Ladies of Queens," travel agents who don't travel share vicariously in the far-flung adventures relayed by a travel show's dreamily handsome cameraman.
Glimpses of childhood in Sofia in "Devil's Heart" intertwine both innocence and danger--amid youthful games and play is the looming awareness that "if someone reported you, you could just disappear." Threats of loss and separation keep siblings tightly bound together in "Lucky People Are Marked." The narrator in "On Manliness" learns "how to be a real man," not from his missing father but from his beloved granddad. In "Go Get 'Em," the narrator prepares to receive her potential in-laws, attempting "to match their lavish dinners and four-course crystal-and-china extravaganza" despite not having even "at least two plates or glasses or forks of the same kind." Community proves far more important--and lasting--than the shoddy new building's crumbling construction in "Hope Number Six."
Stambo's direct and unadorned writing, her pithy, sometimes stinging observations, make her a particularly convincing storyteller. Impressive, too, is her comedic timing, often lightening--without dismissing--heavier realities: geese droppings on cemetery gravestones, for example, as proof that "at least someone came to visit." Relationships among family, friends, strangers--despite the everyday maelstrom of movement and chaos--compose the core of Stambo's diverse collection. The goal, as a character comments, is to "feel peaceful and connected to this world." --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Sofi Stambo's prize-winning debut story collection insightfully examines the quotidian lives of Bulgarians and Brooklynites.