East of the West: A Country in Stories

"Penkov's teeming stories accomplish in phrases what lesser writers take chapters to convey. . . . A collection of triumphs." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

A grandson tries to buy Lenin's corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving v...