Miroslav Penkov is a young writer from Bulgaria who moved to the U.S. ten years ago to attend college and the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. He is the winner of the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction, an instructor at the University of North Texas, and a fiction editor of the American Literary Review. All nice: but what I am most interested in is Pankov's new book: East of the West: A Country in Stories.
He tells the tale of his tales at Work in Progress, the blog of Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
I wanted people to listen and be moved by our tales, and to show them that Bulgarians are not all car thieves and prostitutes, though there are plenty of those too. ... So in East of the West we have stories that speak of Bulgaria as it was during the Ottoman years and then as it was during the fights for liberation from the Turks. There are stories of the Balkan Wars, of the chokehold and fall of Communism. There are stories that speak of what became of both Christians and Muslims when regimes changed. Then finally there are stories that show the reader what’s happening now, with so many young people leaving for the West. The final and most modern story here, “Devshirmeh,” leads us onward in time, but also twists and takes us back, and like a snake bites its own tail. Once upon a time the Turks stole Bulgarian boys and turned them into Ottoman soldiers. This is the devshirmeh, the blood tribute. It is an awful, sentimental, tragic part of our folklore, but if we read historical sources carefully, we can find instances when parents offered their children to the Turks – because a Muslim soldier could live a much better life than a Christian peasant.
"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." That's the summation of some of the stories in the book's official description. You can hear Penkov talk about one of the East of the West stories, which originally appeared in Orion Magazine, here. Another tale, "A Picture of Yuki" appeared in One Story this spring; he discusses it with editor Hannah Tinti here. East of the West is Penkov's first book. I can't wait to get a copy in my hands.
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