Ruth Bonapace
Ruth Bonapace’s comic novel The Bulgarian Training Manual was an Elle Magazine 2024 top summer read. Publishers Weekly calls it a “whimsical delight,” while Kirkus Reviews says it is “an absurd romp through modern culture.” It’s received high praise from New York Times best-selling authors Helen Simonson, Meg Wolitzer, and Mark Leyner, among others.
The Bulgarian Training Manual tells the story of working-class Jersey girl Tina Bontempi in her quest to find her true parents and jeans that fit. When her gym buddy with benefits gives her a mysterious workout book, Tina embarks on a mind-bending Oz-like journey to Bulgaria and back. It’s been compared to Alice in Wonderland, if only she’d fallen into a rabbit hole at The Jersey Shore.
This book is a sly look at self-improvement, fame, and branding, colliding with self-doubts and fervent dreams.
Vividly crafted, we believe it would adapt well to film in the hands of an equally enthusiastic and talented filmmaker.
Ruth earned her MFA from Stony Brook University after a career in journalism, including two years covering pro sports for The Associated Press. Easily bored, she also ran a laundromat in Jersey City, edited a women’s magazine, became a gym rat, sold real estate and mortgages, got her teeth straightened and raised three children, including one adopted from Vietnam. She went to an all-girls Catholic school, where she was the star trumpet player and perfected the art of lampooning nuns.
Her work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Newsday, The Southampton Review, and The Saturday Evening Post. She is a two-time finalist in the annual American Writer’s Review. The Bulgarian Training Manual is published by Clash Books.
“…Tina’s zany voice offers plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. This is a whimsical delight.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
http://www.publishersweekly.com/9781960988102
“An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.”
Kirkus Reviews
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ruth-bonapace/the-bulgarian-training-manual/
“Bonapace tells this yarn with glee, careening between genres and pop culture references, swinging at fitness culture and self-improvement all the way.” ELLE Magazine – top 2024 summer books
https://www.elle.com/culture/books/g60962313/best-summer-books-2024/
“Bulgarian Training Manual is great! Well-done and rare!” — Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club founder and Nuyorican Poets Café original slam master.
“This is a joyfully freakish story held aloft and borne along with the strength and dazzle of the legendary strongmen and strongwomen at its heart. Tina is a loud, raucous and unapologetic heroine of New Jersey and her stream-of-consciousness rings refreshingly true to life. I kept waiting for the ambitious arc of the narrative to deflate but Ruth Bonapace never wavered from her headlong rush forward . . . “ — Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
The Bulgarian Training Manual is inventive, surreal, and powered by the unexpected – Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings and The Wife
One could say many things about Ruth Bonapace’s The Bulgarian Training Manual – that it’s a “romp,” a “hoot,” a “wild ride,” a “pumped picaresque,” etc. And they’d all be true. (I’d like to add that it’s the first book that ever made me see jacked biceps and six-pack abs as Freudian conversion symptoms.). Tina Acqualina, our narrator, idles high, ever alive to the world around her, deploying a homemade lingo that crackles like a cheek full of cinnamon chewing gum. One is gripped by this voice, in its clutches. What Emily Dickenson did for metaphysical conjecture, Bonapace (via Acqualina) does for obstreperous attention-seeking. For anyone who’s ever entered a gym (or a bar or a real estate office or a Walmart or a church, for that matter) and asked oneself, amid the clanking and grunting and preening, is all this just some vain and ultimately meaningless exercise in pure narcissism or is there some deeper psychological, sociocultural or spiritual significance at play here? Bonapace gleefully answers: Yes and Yes! – Mark Leyner, Why Do Men Have Nipples? and Et Tu, Babe