REVIEW: East of the West by Miroslav Penkov

East of the West

by Miroslav Penkov

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

240 pp/$24

The journey from casual reader to full-blown literary nerd is fraught with the particular peril I will call “countries unread.” You’re at a party, the drinks are flowing and the conversation turns to books. “Dostoevsky rules!” Someone says. “He’s the greatest of the Russians.” You agree, despite never having read Dostoevsky (okay, you did read the first hundred or so pages of Crime and Punishment, but that doesn’t count). Come to think of it, you haven’t read any Russian literature! What do you do when the conversation turns to you?

“While we’re on the subject of Eastern Europe,” you begin, “have you read anything from Bulgaria?” You’ll probably get a “no,” followed by the subsequent task of informing the partygoer about the extraordinarily diverse and endlessly entertaining short stories contained in Miroslav Penkov’s debut collection, East of the West. Though it carries the subtitle A Country in Stories, Penkov does not strictly write “Bulgarian” literature. These tales deal with the American experience almost as much as they deal with the Bulgarian.

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LIU Summer Writers Lab Reading

1. The crowd at Greenlight, ready to party. And listen. 2. Writer Benjamin Hale, Lisa Erickson of Scribner, & Sara Ortiz of Broadcastr.

On June 16-18th, you may have been going to the beach, or doing your shitty work at your shitty job, or going to the doctor’s office for that weird rash, or whatever else. At Long Island University’s Summer Writers Lab, however, students and writers were enjoying an intensive few days in which they learned (and/or taught) about the fundamentals of fiction. The lab included workshops lead by Jennifer Egan, Marlon James, Gabriel Cohen, Wesley Stace, and Rick Moody, as well as panels on the current literary marketplace and creating the writer’s website.

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Riding with Jesus: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of “badbadbad,” is blogging his book tour. This is his first stop, featuring an interview by EL’s editors.

A few years back, I wrote the first draft of a novel called badbadbad. Then I started writing songs derived from the narrative, and pretty soon a full-length album magically appeared. So now there was a traditional print book and a CD soundtrack, both called “badbadbad.” Since threesomes are trendy—and the art-making business is all about capitalizing on what’s hot—the natural next step for 3xbad was obvious: get out on the street and make a movie. Better yet: “an independent documentary film.” It’s amazing what total strangers will say to a video camera. The prompts came from the story’s central themes: fear, hypocrisy, e-intimacy, sexual morality, and self-destruction v. redemption. Another year and countless tech fails later, the project’s tripartite soul was born: Literature the Father, Music the Son, Film the Holy Spirit. Let’s call it a transmedia novel. I live in San Francisco, after all.

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Bloomsday in Dublin

1. Stephen, Mary, and baby Browyn from Co. Offaly dressed up for their first Bloomsday. They ate breakfast at the Gresham. “He had the kidneys, I didn’t.” 2. Outside the James Joyce Centre, ballet dancer Eilene McLoughlin says she likes dressing up on Bloomsday to celebrate with all the old and happy souls of the bygone era. 3. The original door to 7 Eccles Street – home of Leopold Bloom – is hidden in the back patio of the Joyce Centre.


They say you shouldn’t start a novel talking about the weather, but if you’re setting your story in Dublin that’s the only way to do it. This Bloomsday, in the newly minted UNESCO City of Literature, we had all four seasons in the one day, begob!

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Brooklyn Book Festival Preview

1. The view from Borough Hall. Gorgeous! 2. This is what a “multimedia room” crowded with bookish people looks like.

Yesterday Brooklyn’s Borough Hall hosted the reception for the Brooklyn Bookfest Preview. After checking in, we were ushered into something called the multimedia room because “that’s where the alcohol is.” After socializing for a bit, borough president Marty Markowitz took the stage to tell us about the upcoming bookfest, which will take place September 15-18.

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Go the Fuck to Sleep

1. Adam Mansbach’s children’s book for adults. 2. Author Adam Mansbach.

The evening at the New York Public Library began with a recording of Werner Herzog reading a dirty book. Well, it isn’t a dirty book per se. What we have is a children’s book for adults that utilizes a double narrative from a frustrated parent. One is the straightforward lullaby that the child is meant to hear. The other is the internal monologue of a parent whose rage crescendos when the unaware child just won’t “go the fuck to sleep.” Said dual nature came across seamlessly when treated with Herzog’s narration last night, and with what one can hope will be multiple audio versions coming out in the future, I can see Go the Fuck to Sleep becoming a conduit for some pretty damn amazing performance art.

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A Novel Night at Franklin Park

1. Diana Spechler, reading from Skinny. 2. Teju Cole, reading from his forthcoming project that he will be working on “for the next ten years.” 3. Joey Lake, who just moved to New York and writes for The Economist, & Sara Cactus.

It’s Monday, it’s June, you’re in Brooklyn. The day is unseasonably cool and cloudy, but the sun makes an appearance toward the end of the day, and it’s beautiful out. So what to do with your evening? Well, if you’re like 200 other Brooklynites, you head over to Franklin Park in Crown Heights for their monthly reading series.

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Birdsong Launch

1. Birdsong Reader Chantal Johnson & Editor-in-Chief, founder, and emcee Tommy Pico. 2. Katie Naoum, whose poetry appeared in issue #15 & Julia Norton, who designed one of the two covers. They are working on a children’s book together, and both met Pico in college.

Birdsong is a multi-disciplinary collective and micropress based in Williamsburg that “share[s] commitments to social movements of feminism, anti-racism, queer positivity, class-consciousness, and DIY cultural production.” Vaudeville Park is a non-profit space in Williamsburg is dedicated to “showcas[ing] unique and affordable community arts programming.” So it made sense when Birdsong had the release party for their 15th issue at Vaudeville Park.

Thursday was disgusting and hot, and then it was disgusting and rainy. This transformed Vaudeville Park into a hot, humid white box. People repurposed the zine into fans and cooled off with iced coffee and beers (donated by Brooklyn Brewery).

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REVIEW: Follow Me Down by Kio Stark

Follow Me Down

by Kio Stark

Red Lemonade

$13.95 (paper)/ Free (e)/ 160pp

In her exquisite debut novel, Kio Stark captivates. Protagonist Lucy discovers a tattered envelope from 1978 addressed to an empty neighborhood lot in her mailbox. Curious, she steams open the sealed flap and discovers a photo of a handsome man inside (the statute of limitation for mail tampering, Stark keenly informs us through a librarian, is only five years). In the back of the photo three words are written: “He has it.” The novel follows Lucy’s quest to discover who the man in the photo is, what he has, and what his relationship with the empty lot is.

Judging these elements of the novel—its basic plot—it may be simple to flippantly categorize the novel as a mystery, in which Lucy behaves as a detective. Lucy certainly sleuths; however, the novel portrays more than just a bland recount of her various clues and journeys. Instead, Follow Me Down is a complex psychological portrait of longing and loss. The novel contains so many physical doors and so much knocking, as Lucy travels boroughs and streets to discover the origin of the photo. But the door which concerns me most is the one Stark introduces at the novel’s initiation: a knock on the door, which Lucy does not answer, which she runs away from. Though the novel’s plot focuses on discovery (who is the man in the photo? What did he do? Where is he?), the novel’s psychology concentrates upon transition, yearning, escape.

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In California: Ricky Jay & David Mamet on Deception

Besides being an actor, world renowned magician, and ex-sideshow-outside-talker – the person who dares you to look inside the tent – Ricky Jay is a scholar and collector of shameless intentions.

Writers love strange, faltered truths as engines love combustion – each metaphor needs such a truth for contrast, each character needs three or four for intrigue, each ending needs to leave a few unexplained.

Recently, Jay met with writer, director, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, and long time collaborator David Mamet and talked about stories pulled from essays in Celebrations of Curious Characters, Jay’s new book. Mamet talked about the lure of illusions, comparing it to reality’s rigid cause & effect. A trick with a good finale gives “the pleasure of being proved wrong,” he said. Makes me think of the line from The Brothers Bloom, “The perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just the thing they wanted.”

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