Thrown into Nature

Thrown is a hilarious picaresque about a sixteenth-century doctor and his faithful sidekick who travel Spain "curing" every ailment possible with the use of tobacco in a variety of forms—the leaves made into a poultice, the smoke piped into the anus, etc. Behind the hilarious antics is a commentary on the power of money and the evils of charlatanism.

Milen Ruskov is a Bulgarian writer and translator. His first novel, Pocket Encyclopaedia of Mysteries, received the Bulgarian Prize for Debut Fiction, and Thrown into Nature won the VIK Novel of the Year. He has translated more than 20 books into Bulgarian.

Angela Rodel earned an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010 she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today.