Cynthia M. Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96) comes to The Big Apple to read!

Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96) is the author of Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories and she will be reading in New York City in March. If you can, see her on the 8th of March at 7:30 p.m. at the famous McNally Jackson Books store, 52 Prince Street.

In May, on Sunday the 15th, at 7 p.m. Cindy will return to New York (this time the East Village) and appear at Sunday Salon 43 East 7th between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. The co-founder of this amazing showcase for writers is RPCV Nita Niveno (Cameroon 1988–90).

Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963–65) writes of Cynthia’ s book: “I am greatly impressed with Cold Snap, a look at Bulgarian Life — family life, school life, frustration, even passion and desire. Cynthia Phoel writes from inside this culture, convincingly and with real insight.”

And reviewer Dona Seaman (has in part) this to say: Phoel’s first collection of stories and a novella incisively dramatizes the interlocked lives of the beleaguered denizens of a Bulgarian town. Phoel spent time in Bulgaria as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but one gets no sense of an outsider looking in. Instead, she fully inhabits the minds of her jittery characters as they grapple with various forms of family pressure, poverty, and the maddening cold… . With the fierce cold serving as a metaphor for the deep social freeze of this long tyrannized land, Phoel is as confident as the great Russian writer Gogol in her acid humor and insightful portrayals of people who “could endure anything,” making for an unusually commanding and affecting debut.