I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to write Bulgarian stories without considering history and politics. Here, Penkov discusses the way in which politics enters his work: In it, she and the author discuss the challenges of translating your own work, the benefits and limitations of writing in another language, and how the role of an imagined reader affects the writing process. We’ve also got a sneak peek of Molly Antopol’s interview with Penkov, which will appear tomorrow in Part II of The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar profile. To read the entire review of this collection, please click here.

Penkov gives us specific, intimately drawn glimpses into the various Bulgarian species of this thing we call the human condition, and he does it with a well-honed style that is not merely ornamental. Its bold subtitle promises us broad cross-sections of Bulgarian society, and he resists commonplace post-Communist sentimentality to show us a broad range of Bulgarian society-older generations who leave themselves behind in the face of change, younger generations that lose their way, people who leave home and come back changed, people who leave home and never come back at all. In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book. In his recent review of this collection, contributing editor Steven Wingate writes:

His story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie, and his work will be included in the 2012 PEN/O. His stories have won The Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in or are forthcoming from A Public Space, One-Story, Orion, The Sunday Times, and Granta Online. He completed a bachelor’s degree in Psychology followed by an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review. Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria and came to the U.S. This week’s feature is Miroslav Penkov’s debut collection, East of the West, published this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

East of the west miroslav penkov