Reminiscent of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, Oleg Woolf's Bessarabian Stamps -- a cycle of 16 stories set mostly in the village of Sanduleni -- is a vivid, surreal evocation of a liminal world. Sanduleni's denizens are in permanent flux, forever shifting languages, cultures, and states (in every sense of the word). Woolf has relocated magical realism to Moldova. With the turmoil in current Russia and the post-Soviet world, Bessarabian Stamps emphasizes the absurdity of the mundane.

Translated by: Boris Dralyuk