Customer Reviews

Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier

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It seemed like only yesterday that the Berlin Wall went down. In the intervening fourteen years, everything seems to have changed for the people of Eastern Europe -- for better and for worse. They call the former communist countries the "Wild wild east," and as the stories in this terrific new anthology show, the FSU shares more than a passing resemblance to our own Wild West of the 19th century. Stories by Gary Shteyngart and Paul Greenberg alone are worth the price of admission. Bravo!

This is a smart and funny collection of short fiction. I especially liked Arthur Phillips's story "Wenceslaus Square," which reads like postmodern John Le Carre. The story by Tom Bissell, about the reprobate son of a career diplomat posted to the ass-end of the world is hilarious, then turns very dark. And John Beckman's "Babylon Revisited Redux," in addition to the nod to Fitzgerald in the title, made me remember why spoofing Dan Quayle was so much fun. And Gary Shteyngart's "Shylock on the Neva," which was originally in The New Yorker, strikes me as a nuanced slice of life in Russia today. Excellent.

Wild East collects an even dozen stories that take as their subject matter the chaos of life in the post-Soviet, post-Berlin Wall east. The stories range from Bulgakov-like surrealist fables to visions of apocalyptic meltdown, with a good deal of vividly- described dissolute behavior by the inhabitants of these curious demimondes. Tough, scary, and funny, and an early taste of what may well be the next literary hotbed.

First-time author Boris Fishman will definitely be around for years to come, if his forthcoming books are anything like this one. Wild East is a wonderful collection of short stories with an Eastern European flair, each reflecting the unique perspective of its author. (Especially look for the selections by Gary Shteyngart and Tom Bissell.) As a Cold War junkie, I can say that this is one of the most well-written and compiled sets of stories that deal with Eastern Europe AFTER the fall of the Iron Curtain. Heartily recommended.

We have a mix which seems to be about 50-50, that is the Balkans figure heavily into a number of the stories in varying degrees of importance. So, even though this anthology is about the `Wild East,' a good bit of the Balkans is thrown in, and I don't think many consider the remains of the Yugoslavia as the `East'. It's the Balkans.

None the less, there is good reading here. There's comic irony, and the highs of serious pointedness. But one of the longer stories suffers from a mild turgidness, and some of the comic work is, in the slightest way, cliché-ish , but I appreciate what the stories are saying. And the overall reading is good. A few of the stories are very strong and well rounded.