Reminiscent of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Oleg Woolf’s Bessarabian Stamps — a cycle of sixteen stories set mostly in the village of Sănduleni — is a vivid, surreal evocation of a liminal world. Sănduleni’s denizens are in permanent flux, forever shifting languages, cultures, and states, in every sense of the word. With a warm, Bessarabian irony recalling one of Eastern Europe’s long-forgotten regions, the Stamps explore what it means to live on the edges of empires, which rise and fall while Sănduleni abides.