Miroslav Penkov, assistant professor of English, has published his first collection of short stories, East of the West: A Country in Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The stories include the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction winner "Buying Lenin," about a grandson who tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather.

Penkov is a native of Bulgaria who grew up listening to his mother tell him stories that she made up and his father tell him about Bulgarian history. The collection, which has been called "a dark yet hilarious pleasure," is filled with characters wrestling with the weight of history, exile and debt to family while their stories remain light and animated. Penkov teaches creative writing at UNT and currently is editor of the American Literary Review.