Miroslav Penkov

«Los impresionantes relatos de Penkov consiguen en pocas páginas lo que la mayoría de escritores no logran en muchos capítulos», The LA Times.Al este de Occidente es un libro único escrito por un aut

In his mesmerising first novel, the internationally celebrated short-story writer Miroslav Penkov spins the intriguing tale of an American student who returns to Bulgaria, the country he left as a child. His mission is to track down his grandfather and to find out why he suddenly cut off all contact with the family three years before.The trail leads him to a remote village on the border with Turkey, a stones throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains - a place of pagan mysteries and storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he is drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts blaze anew, until the past finally yields up its plangent secrets.

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 Penkovs strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection. 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 Penkovs unmatched eye for the absurd.

Un ambicioso debut que conjuga con gran talento amor, misterio y secretos de familia.Un joven inmigrante búlgaro regresa a su país de origen para localizar a su abuelo, quien inesperadamente rompió todo contacto con la familia tres años atras. Las pistas le conduciran a un pequeño pueblo en la frontera con Turquia y a un paso de Grecia, encaramado a la mitica montañade Strandja: un lugar envuelto en misterios paganos, en el que las cigueñas negras anidan en robles gigantescos. Alli, en las montañas, se ve arrastrado por su abuelo a un laberinto de medias verdades y acaba enamorandose irremediablemente de una chica musulmana que no esta a su alcance. Viejos fantasmas cobraran vida y conflictos que creian olvidados resurgiran de nuevo hasta que al pasado no le quede otra salida que rendirse a sus deshonrosos secretos.