The International Booker Prize-winning author of Time Shelter joins Lea Ypi to explore memory, imagination and the elastic possibilities of fiction.

What if you could invent an entire life with a stranger in an airport café? Or see the past through one eye and the future through the other, while remaining unable to glimpse the present? These are among the unsettling premises in The Man with Many Names, the new collection of short stories by Georgi Gospodinov, one of Europe’s most inventive and celebrated contemporary writers. Moving from the Balkans to the moon and beyond, Gospodinov’s stories find the extraordinary in apparently ordinary lives. A fleeting encounter can become an imagined lifetime; a casual gesture can alter someone else’s fate. Funny, melancholy and gloriously unpredictable, these are stories that ask us to reconsider how we experience time, how we remember, and how much of any life remains unknowable to others.

Gospodinov came to international prominence with Time Shelter, which won the 2023 International Booker Prize, and has since established himself as one of the essential literary voices of post-communist Europe. His new collection, translated by his longtime collaborator Angela Rodel, brings some of his finest short fiction into English for the first time.