Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a writer whose style has been described as ""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work ""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.