Click on the Google Preview image above to read some pages of this book!
The debut of a new international star with an outstanding collection of short stories, spiked with homesickness and fizzing with the absurd.
A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection.
In EAST OF THE WEST, Penkov writes with great empathy of centuries of tumult; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as they wrestle with the weight of history, with the debt to family, with the pangs of exile, the stories in EAST OF THE WEST are always light on their feet, animated by Penkov s unmatched eye for the absurd.
About The Author
Miroslav Penkov was born in Bulgaria and lived there, in the capital city of Sofia, until he graduated from First English Language High school. In 2001, at the age of eighteen, Miroslav went to the University of Arkansas where he completed a bachelor's degree in Psychology, followed by an MFA in Creative Writing. In 2008 The Southern Review awarded his story 'Buying Lenin' the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize in fiction. A month later Salman Rushdie and Heidi Pitlor chose the story to appear in the 2008 Best American Short Stories. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas and a fiction editor of the American Literary Review.
