Other buying options:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

About the book

A nervous dog takes flight over New York. A woman soothes her neighbors with multilingual telepathy. A purse snatcher inherits her victim’s scribbled lists—and her worries. In these stories, immigrants dance and laugh their way out of absurd situations and into even messier ones, passing through diners, offices, and painter’s workshops. Casting about for words to match their new realities, they reshape the English language and greet chaos with a grin.

Bursting with warmth and buzzing with wit, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much pulls at the threads of daily life, unwinding the ordinary into scenes of hilarity, introspection, and surprising connection.

Praise for People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much:

“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 People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much made my heart quicken. Her stories take the reader to the cusp of everything—heartbreak, hilarity, loss, rediscovery, and a deep sense of longing for that thing we call home. And I completely fell for Stambo's half-real, half-surreal characters, who are also animals, reminding us that our mammalian past is filled with frolic and hope even in the dark. I'm smitten.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and Thrust

“I can't remember the last time I read a debut collection with such excitement. This is a thrilling book: hilarious, surreal, humane, startlingly wise. Sofi Stambo is a brilliant new voice, exhilaratingly original.”

— Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain and What Belongs to You

“Sofi Stambo is an incredible writer—sly and intelligent, compassionate and sharp—who brilliantly straddles the line between comedy and despair sentence by sentence, story by story. People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much is a gorgeous collection that manages to be both historically rich and timeless, as well as a deft exploration of what home means when one's homeland, Bulgaria in this case, has changed so much and so often. A stunning and important new book by a writer with talent in spades.”

— Molly Antopol, author of The Unamericans

“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

“A short-story collection that combines off-kilter humor with a considerable amount of warmth and depth. From old-world Bulgaria to modern day New York, Stambo walks the reader through the domestic everyday experiences of young women, office workers, and immigrants. . . and she does so with light and easy prose perfectly designed to stir something within. Very ruminative and affecting.”

— Stuart McCommon, Interabang Books

About the author

Sofi Stambo is a fiction writer based in New York. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel, This Train Has Sailed, won the 2024 LitMag Virginia Woolf Award. Her short stories have won the 2015 DISQUIET Literary Prize for fiction, and been nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Agni, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, The Common, River Styx, and The Rumpus. Links to some of her publications can be found on her website www.sofistambo.com. Stambo has a master’s degree in literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria, and was a graduate student in Literature at City College, New York.

Book Details

Paperback ISBN: 9781632064172 • $18.00
eBook ISBN: 9781632064189
Publication date: May 26, 2026
5" x 7.125" • 288 pages
Fiction: Short Stories / Immigration / City Life / Family Life / Multigenerational
Rights: World All Languages, Audio, Film