Wild East - 9781932112153

Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier is a unique and timely anthology of great writing about one of the most fractious, mercurial, maladjusted, and misunderstood corners of the globe in a generation. Eastern Europe since 1990 has been a crossroads of iron rule, cowboy commerce, old hatreds, and new licentiousness. In other words, a place where literature thrives, as it does in the wake of all great upheavals. Wild East collects the most urgent dispatches from some of our most gifted cultural correspondents. Drug-addled New Russians preaching business-speak and "empowerment" on Nevsky Prospekt. A curious and pressing need for a Parisian blowtorch in the fields of fire in Sarajevo. The romantic assignment of a particularly fetching Czech intelligence officer. These are the subjects of Wild East, a lusty and raucous anthology of stories about the bohemians, danger junkies, and thrill-seekers reveling in the cultural, social, political, and sexual renaissance that followed the fall of the iron curtain. Twelve of today's best young writers, including Arthur Phillips, Gary Shteyngart, Aleksandar Hemon, Charlotte Hobson, Paul Greenberg, and John Beckman brilliantly explore the proposition "Prague in the '90s was like Paris in the '20s."