site.btaZdravka Evtimova's Science Fiction Story Collection Published in US

The Starship Sloane Publishing Company has published Bulgarian writer Zdravka Evtimova's collection of science fiction stories, The Strangest of Stories: A Collection of the Weird and Surreal, Evtimova told BTA. 

The book was released mid-July and includes stories written in English over the past five years. The book has cover art by Bruce Pennington and a foreword by Nigel Suckling, a Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer.

The collection features stories that combine the fantastic, the magical and the surreal with themes from everyday life. The back-cover blurb says Evtimova conjures "eerie, uneasy realities at once bleak and brooding". Author A. J. Dalton describes the stories as "metamorphic" and "full of romance, gentle humour, mystery and surprise". He says "there is a feeling of the modern folk tale about many of them" and "flights of fancy become deeper psychological explorations".

This is Evtimova's second book released by Starship Sloane Publishing after He May Wear My Silence, which received the newly established Dr. T. O'Connor Sloane Award for Science Fiction for 2024. Her interest in storytelling began in childhood. Her stories have been published in many countries around the world. In 2015, her story Blood of a Mole was included in English-language textbooks for secondary schools in Denmark, while in January 2019, the same story was included in a literature textbook for lower secondary schools in the US.

Her story Seldom was included in the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology, released by US publisher Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. It's Your Turn was one of 10 winning stories in the 2005 international short story competition Utopia 2005, held in Nantes, France. The story was included in the anthology Utopia 2005 – Dix auteurs du monde entier. Vassil was one of the ten winning entries in the BBC London world short story competition in 2005.