Human kindness, cunning, and the apocalypse: new tales from the Bulgarian melancholic. In Georgi Gospodinov's stories, we encounter rustic villagers in the southern Balkans, a child who adopts various fathers in succession, an author searching all of Lisbon for an unknown beauty, and numerous simple or sophisticated infidelities. Some stories glance back at the country's communist past, while others look toward the future of humanity. Just as in the title story, the time it takes for light to travel from the sun to the earth is precisely the little time the author grants the reader to read the text, many of Gospodinov's works harbor thoughts of apocalypse, concerns, and sorrow over the unreliability of people. Playful, elegant, and steeped in all the waters of postmodernity, Gospodinov unfolds a narrative.