East of the West: A Country in Stories

Miroslav Penkov

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jun 21, 2011 - Fiction - 240 pages

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 beguiling and deeply felt debut.

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.

What people are saying

Review: East of the West

User Review  - Alice Harvey - Goodreads

Great writer would read more anytime.

Review: East of the West

User Review  - Vasilena - Goodreads

Very interesting stories. It reminds me of Nickolay Haitov's Divi razkazi (Wild stories). The book is like a modern version of Haitov's stories. I recommend it everyone who wants to get to know modern Bulgarian literature.

About the author

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He arrived in America in 2001 and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He has won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, and his story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review.

Bibliographic information

• Title: East of the West: A Country in Stories
• Author: Miroslav Penkov
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
• ISBN: 1429968826, 9781429968829
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Cultural Heritage; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)