The Picador Book Room

If you like Eastern European and literary fiction, you’re going to love this short story collection. As it’s New in Paperback from Picador for June, you can find it online and in stores now. 

East of the West: A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov

“Penkov’s teeming stories accomplish in phrases what lesser writers take chapters to convey… . A collection of triumphs.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“An agile and assured debut … In each of these stylistically old-school yet freshly envisioned morality tales, Penkov burnishes brute circumstances to surprising beauty.” —Elle 

“Splendid … These stories are not the promising work of a first-time author. They are already a promise fulfilled—wise, bright, and deep with sympathy.”  —Alec Solomita, The New Republic

A grandson tries to buy Lenin’s corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd, East of the West is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He arrived in America in 2001 and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He has won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, and his story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review.

Continuing with our New from Picador releases for June, here’s one for all you literary fiction fans. On sale online and in stores June 5th.

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World : A Novel by Donald Atrim

“A dark, suburban fantasy … richly funny, even whimsical, and bizarrely familiar.” —The New Yorker 

“Entertaining and mischievously imagined … Antrim is a wonderful, truly original comic writer.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A slice of sulfurous whimsy… You are draw in because of the depth of human feeling that Antrim smuggles in… almost below the radar level.” —The New York Times

“The author’s surreal vision is both imaginative and wholly his own … A striking literary discovery.” —The Boston Globe

In the seaside community of Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the citizens are restless. The mayor has fired stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, and his public execution was a messy affair. As these hawkish suburbanites fortify their houses with deadly moats and land mines, a former third-grade teacher named Pete Robinson steps forward with a tenuous bid to replace the mayor. But can anyone satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim’s story of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.

Donald Antrim is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.

The first of five New in Paperback titles from Picador is Siri Hustvedt’s essay collection LIVING, THINKING, LOOKING. Available online and in bookstores near you tomorrow, June 5th. 

Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt
A Picador Paperback Original 

“No one writing about art today comes closer than Siri Hustvedt to the elusive strangeness of a great painting.” —Calvin Tomkins 

“She brings both knowledge and an artist’s insight to the discussion of memory, language, and personal identity… . It is Hustvedt’s gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.” —Hilary Mantel

The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. 

The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt’s life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is “the self”? Hustvedt’s unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human?

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the author of five novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn.