Lenore Myka (Romania 1994-96) New Collection of Award Winning Stories: King of the Gypsies

Lenore Myka is the author of King of the Gypsies: Stories, winner of the 2014 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, that will be published by BkMk Press this September.

Her fiction has been selected as a notable short story by The Best American Non-Required Reading of 2013, and a distinguished story by The Best American Short Stories of 2008. She was the winner of the 2013 Cream City Review and the  Booth Journal Fiction Contests, a finalist for the 2013 Glimmer Train Open Short Story Contest, and a semi-finalist for the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Contest.

Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Booth Journal, West Branch, Massachusetts Review, H.O.W. Journal, Upstreet Magazine, Talking River Review, and the anthology Further Fenway Fiction.

King of Gypsies is described this way:

Set against a wild and haunting landscape, the short fiction in this collection spotlights the struggles of everyday individuals to overcome the ghosts they have inherited from Romania’s communist past.

The book, that won the publisher’s BkMk’s G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, was selected for that honor by PEN/Faulkner finalist Lorraine M. López, who writes, ”Myka’s characters release uncountable fibers, connecting them to one another in the linked narratives, binding them to the harshly beguiling Romania they inhabit and that inhabits them.”

Lenore, who grew up near Buffalo, New York, and as a Polish-American Catholic, says her outlook on life is: “I am hung-up on fairness in the world, despite being told from an early age that life isn’t fair.”

Lenore now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Of her new book, here is what two other RPCVs writers have to say:

“Lenore Myka’s collection of short stories, King of the Gypsies, heralds the debut of an extraordinary writer. With compassion, insight, breadth of knowledge, black humor, and an exquisite use of language, Myka crosses from Romania to the United States and back again, telling tales of characters cruelly haunted by having lived under totalitarian rule.  Each story is brimming with wisdom about the human condition; this is an author I would trust and follow anywhere.” 

Marnie Mueller, Author of Green Fires, 
The Climate of the Country, and My Mother’s Island.

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“​Lenore Myka is a skilled craftswoman, sketching stories so exquisite and sincere that their power is unexpected and often fierce. She imbues each tale with candor and nuance, letting her characters thunder forth on their own, unprotected from life’s realities yet carried by the dream of how things could be. The result is a portrait of Romania painted by its disenfranchised, its émigrés, and its foreigners, that shakes off stereotypes and hones in on the hopes and the vulnerabilities that that dwell in the human soul. Rarely have I felt so quickly drawn in to a collection of short stories. Rarely have I wanted to begin again as soon as I reached the end.”

Sarah Erdman, Author of Nine Hills to Nambonkaha:
Two Years in the Heart of an African Village