Wildly imaginative and endlessly entertaining, Georgi Gospodinov's short stories provide a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges and a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-Communist life in Eastern Europe. These stories within stories and contemporary fables—whether a tongue-in-cheek crime story or the Christmas tale of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or to an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box—come together in unique and surprising ways, offering readers a kaleidoscopic experience from one of Bulgaria's most critically acclaimed authors.

GEORGI GOSPODINOV is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and critic whose works include Natural Novel (Dalkey Archive, 2005), which has also been translated into French, Danish, Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, and Macedonian.  He is a professor at the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the editor of a weekly literary and cultural newspaper.  He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.
 
ALEXIS LEVITIN, aprofessor at SUNY Plattsburgh in New York, has published twenty-two books of translations, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm (New Directions, 1989), Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio De Andrade (New Directions, 2003), and Carlos De Oliveira’s Guernica and Other Poems (Guernica Editions, 2004).
 
MAGDALENA LEVY is a freelance translator who has translated into Bulgarian more than forty books by authors such as Joanne Harris, Eoin Colfer, Susanna Clarke, Alberto Manguel, Yann Martel, Hélène Rioux, and Eric Bogosian. She lives in Sofia, Bulgaria with her husband, daughter, and son.