Elena Seymenliyska

Writer and Editor

London

Freelance writer and editor

Elena Seymenliyska

Writer and Editor

London

Freelance writer and editor

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, review: 'An elegy to Istanbul'
Mevlut is 12 when he arrives in Istanbul. It is the summer of 1969, and he has left his mother and sisters back home in the Anatolian village to join his father, Mustafa, selling yogurt and boza on the city’s maze of streets. They walk for hours, his father with a wooden yoke across his shoulders, two heavy trays suspended from each end, calling out their wares.
The Telegraph
Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg, review: 'sardonic slacker philosophising'
Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010), and is now starring as a stoner in the indie film American Ultra. He has also written three off-Broadway plays. Bream Gives me Hiccups is his first book, a collection of short stories, many of which were first published online in McSweeney's.
The Telegraph
Nell Zink: the great late starter
Nell Zink, 51, always wrote but never sought publication. Her singular voice was discovered in a manner that is as quirky as her prose. Born in California and raised in Virginia, Zink studied philosophy before embarking on a succession of menial jobs - bricklayer, secretary, waitress - that left her mind free to make its own entertainment.
The Telegraph
Lucky Alan: and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem, review: 'subtle'
Lucky Alan brings to mind Lucky Jim: like the hero of Kingsley Amis’s comic novel, the character in Jonathan Lethem’s title story considers himself anything but lucky. Alan Zwelish is that toxic combination of masculine pride and intellectual inhibition, bristling at the merest kindness from his elderly Manhattan neighbour Sigismund Blondy, a theatre director.
The Telegraph
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney, review: 'powerful'
Elena Seymenliyska applauds a spectacular state-of-the-nation debut set in Cork’s seedy underworld. Late one night, when Maureen Phelan knocks an intruder over the head with a Holy Stone and kills him, she starts a chain of events that rattles through the whole of Cork. First, someone will have to clean up the mess on her kitchen tiles, and it won’t be Maureen.
The Telegraph
The Faithful Couple by A D Miller, review:
Elena Seymenliyska admires a novel on that unusual theme, male friendship. It is 1993 when the faithful couple of this story meet in a youth hostel in San Diego. Both English, both graduates, both in their early 20s, they are homogenous only to the casual American bystander. To those versed in the nuances of the English class system, they come from different worlds.
The Telegraph
Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman, review: 'never short-changed'
Edith Pearlman was 60 when her first short-story collection, Vaquita (1996), was published in the United States. Since then, she has written four further volumes – more than 200 stories in total – and won a dozen prizes for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Binocular Vision (2011).
The Telegraph
Amnesia by Peter Carey, review: 'fascinating and confusing'
When a computer virus hacks into the Australian prison system in 2010, it also infects the American corporations that licensed the software. The virus spreads like bushfire, releasing not only asylum seekers across Australia, but also unlocking thousands of US correctional facilities and prisons. The hacker responsible – “Angel”, aka Gabrielle Baillieux – is the 30-year-old golden daughter of an actress and a left-wing MP.
The Telegraph
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, review: 'deeply moving'
Karen Joy Fowler's Booker-shortlisted novel examines what it means to be human, nonhuman and something in between, says Elena Seymenliyska. The Cookes aren’t your average dysfunctional American family. Rosemary’s father is a pedantic college professor, her mother’s had a nervous breakdown, her brother is wanted by the FBI, and her sister is a chimp.
The Telegraph
Outline by Rachel Cusk, review: 'full of wonderful surprises'
Rachel Cusk has mined her life so thoroughly in her books that it is tempting to view her new novel as a continuation of that narrative. While her fiction has hardly been without plaudits (the Whitbread first novel award in 1993 for Saving Agnes, the Somerset Maugham award in 1997 for The Country Life, the Orange prize shortlist in 2007 for Arlington Park), it is the non-fiction that has won her notoriety.
The Telegraph
‘You need to fill that in, love,’ they told me at the jobcentre. Would my communist work experience count in the UK?
I came to the UK from Bulgaria in 1990, and every job I saw advertised wanted experience. The application forms had box after box for me to list my previous jobs. But all I had ever done was go to school. I tried leaving those pages empty. The forms were handed back. ‘You need to fill that in, love,’ they told me at the jobcentre.
Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver: review
Lionel Shriver’s 12th book is described as a novel, but we get hints to the contrary even before page one. The dedication reads: “To Greg… in the face of whose drastic, fantastic, astonishing life any fiction pales.”. And the frontispiece bears a 2011 headline from The Daily Telegraph: “One in three would trade year of life for ideal body.”.
The Telegraph

About

Elena Seymenliyska

I am a freelance writer and editor. I work mainly for Aeon magazine, sub-editing long-form essays on culture, science and psychology, among other topics. I also review fiction for The Telegraph.
In the past, I have worked for The Daily Telegraph, and my writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, Mayfair Times and Belgravia magazine, among others.
I am studying for an MA in Biography at the University of Buckingham.
I was born in Bulgaria and educated in Sofia, London and Belfast. I now live in London.