It seems totally unfair that I'll have to wait until June to read these <a href="http://miroslavpenkov.com/index.html#" target="_blank">short stories</a> by Miroslav Penkov.

Penkov is a Bulgarian who graduated from the First English Language School. You may recognize the name because that's the school that I taught at my first year in Sofia with the Fulbright. Needless to say, Penkov was long gone by the time I spent a year there teaching.

I read some of Penkov's short stories six months or a year ago at this <a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/fiction/penkov_m/index.htm" target="_blank">online journal Blackbird</a>.  And I was hooked. This week a friend posted a link ot Penkov's website and the upcoming release of his short stories titled East of the West. <em>Clever name</em>.

Turns out that the book isn't going to be published/released until June but apparently you can preorder it at amazon.com. If there's any good news in all of this, it's this: there will be a kindle edition available. Hip, hip hooray.

So until then you'll just have to made do with these short stories and this <a href="http://miroslavpenkov.com/bleninessay.html" target="_blank">short essay about writing his prize winning short story "Buying Lenin"</a> one of the short stories included in the book.  Oh and I guess if you really dug what you've read you could try to get your hands on a copy of The Best American Short Stories of 2008 because Buying Leni