A brilliant debut from a rising talent praised by Salman Rushdie, among others.
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 waters of the river that divides their village into East and West. These are some of the strange, unexpectedly moving events in talented newcomer Miroslav Penkov's vision of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his extraordinary debut collection.
In East of the West Penkov writes with great empathy about 800 years of tumult in troubled Eastern Europe; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as the characters wrestle with the weight of history, the debt to family, and the pangs of exile, the stories themselves are light and deft, animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd. In 2008, Salman Rushdie chose Penkov's story "Buying Lenin" (which appears in this collection) for that year's Best American Short Stories, citing its heart and humour. East of the West reveals the full realization of the brilliant potential that Rushdie recognized.
- ISBN10 038567600X
- ISBN13 9780385676007
- Publish Date 5 July 2011 (first published 21 June 2011)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country CA
- Publisher Doubleday Canada
- Imprint Bond Street Books
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 240
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780385676007