Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier
Edited by Boris Fishman
I must admit, having read a lot of crap expat and travel novels about the region, I started this book with signifigant trepidation. My nervousness was increased when I noticed short stories included by three authors I had read whose books I could not bear to finish - Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan," Arthur Phillip's "Prague," and Wendell Steavenson's "Stories I Stole". However, it was this book and this book alone that cried out from the bookshelves to be read last weekend, so I gave it a shot. Strangely enough, these same authors were some of the most impressive in this particular anthology. While I found Alexander Hemon's "Fatherland" unreadable and Charlotte Hobson's "The Bottle" just slightly better, the rest of the contributions were good reads, including:
Tom Bissell - "The Ambassador's Son"
Wendell Steavenson - "Gika"
Gary Shteyngart - "Shylock on th Neva"
Arthur Phillips - "Weceslas Square"
Josip Novakovich - " Spleen"
Paul Greenberg - "The Subjunctive Mood"
Miljenko Jergovic - "The Condor"
John Beckman - "Babylon Revisited Redux"
Thomas de Waal - "The English House"
Vladimir Sorokin - "Hiroshima"

The collection features a mix of authors from CEE-CIS in translation, expat writers and travel writers.

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