“Sofi Stambo’s wondrous, unpredictable and extraordinarily perceptive humor lights up these pages, and occasionally even sets them on fire. People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much is a superb investigation into the contrary, bemusing, feral and fearsome facets of our shared human character.”
— Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“Sofi Stambo’s prose is effervescent and her humor razor sharp, but it’s her empathy that won my heart. From Bulgarian beaches to city diners, these slice-of-life stories follow characters both heady with hope and noble in defeat, shaping a collection that’s ultimately an ode to the strange wonder of being alive.”
— Priyanka Champaneri, author of The City of Good Death

Winner of the 2024 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much pulls at the threads of daily life, unwinding the ordinary into scenes of humor, introspection, and surprising connection.

Sofi Stambo won LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction in 2024. She was also awarded the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, and the second prize in 2016 No Tokens fiction contest. Stambo was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list. One of her stories was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2018. Her novel All In was a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation in 2023. Stambo has a Master’s degree in Bulgarian Philology from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria, and was a graduate student in Literature at City College, New York. She had been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, The Avalon Review, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Agni, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine and Bellevue Literary Review. Links to some of her publications can be found on her website www.sofistambo.com. She lives in New York.

Yana Mihaylova is a Bulgarian-born and NYC-raised artist and designer. She received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2014, and has studied part-time at Grand Central Atelier, New York Academy of Art, Institute of Classical Art & Architecture, and the Art Students League. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Bursting with wit and unexpected warmth, Sofi Stambo's debut welcomes readers in the the vibrant immigrant enclaves of New York, a city of many faces: Little Italy, Little Odessa, Little Sofia. . . Here, transplants dance and laugh their way out of absurd situations and into even messier ones. As they pass through diners, offices, and painter’s workshops, they cast about for new words to match their new realities, reshaping the English language with fresh purpose and greeting chaos with a grin.

Nimble and daring, Stambo's stories lean into curiosity, family, and the old-world bonds that draw her motley characters together.