Join us for an evening with Anna Kovatcheva, who will read from her debut novel, She Made Herself a Monster. A conversation with John Casteen will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut novel: in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons.
We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?
Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake.
The village Koprivci is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets Anka: a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village Captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him—that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a plan: to conjure a monster so vile, it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own…
Inspired by Slavic folklore, She Made Herself a Monster concocts a clever mix of witchery, ghost stories, heresy, and deception to spin a feminist fable about agency and the power of collective action. It is a haunting and astoundingly cathartic tale of two women who will stop at nothing to take control of their fate.
About the Author: Anna Kovatcheva was born in Bulgaria and now lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University. She Made Herself a Monster was completed while Anna was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her chapbook, The White Swallow, was selected by Aimee Bender as the winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition; her short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading and has appeared in The Kenyon Review and The Iowa Review.
About the Moderator: John Casteen is the author of Free Union and For the Mountain Laurel from the VQR Poetry Series and the University of Georgia Press, and a third manuscript, Rhythm and Blues, that was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He has contributed poems, essays, and opinion/analysis to VQR, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and other periodicals. He teaches at the University of Virginia and serves as principal of Brown Residential College.
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