East of the West: A Country in Stories: The Interplay of Identity and Exoticism in the Short Stories of Miroslav Penkov
East of the West: A Country in Stories: The Interplay of Identity and Exoticism in the Short Stories of Miroslav Penkov

Summary/Abstract: This essay focuses upon a set of questions that arise from the subtitle of Miroslav Penkov’s collection of short stories, East of the West: A Country in Stories (2011): what does it mean to claim that “a country” can be found in a collection of stories? What kinds of cultural andhistorical knowledge do the stories convey through their representations of specific situations, persons, and motivations? How do representations of a country offered in a powerfulforeign language enable and constrain understanding of the formal trajectories of the stories as well as the underlying referential gestures to a particular geopolitical space, to highly mparticularized cultural and historical contexts? How is the narrative voice itself, as realized in each story, created out of the evocation (overt or tonal) of memory, longing, and humor? Penkov offers a complex and compelling performance of one writer’s inhabitation of two cultures, languages, and literary traditions in this, his first published collection. His familiarity with both Bulgaria and the United States enables him to play upon, without blindly assuming, the position of mediator and translator.

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