A Place Like Little Armenia — Kalin Nacheff

Inspired by Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, A Place Like Little Armenia is the first Bulgarian-American novel, written using a surrealist mixture of memoir and fiction - a technique borrowed from Miller's famous book. In A Place Like Little Armenia, the reader is plunged into the world of a Bulgarian immigrant who had established himself in the safety of the Armenian community in Southern California. Strictly speaking, the book is a novella roughly the size of Orwell's Animal Farm. Other perspectives that make this book a novelty: it's the first novel by a Bulgarian-born American who wrote in English; it's the first novel written in English by an American whose first language was Bulgarian; the novel also deals with the American immigrant experience from the point of view of a Bulgarian.