"The collapse of the Soviet empire entailed not only the Blitzkrieg dissolution of the socialist economies and one-party states of Eastern Europe, but also immediate accidental and incidental changes in the everyday lives of its residents. With an ear for the ironic, the sensual, the playful, and the tragic, Kristen Ghodsee tells personal stories from this period of dissolution, which began several decades before the Berlin Wall came down. Drawing from her encounters in many years of research in Bulgaria, she portrays the changing nature of experience in that place during that time. Though understood as impoverished at the time, this socialist experiment reveals, in retrospect, lives filled with adventure, surprising friendships, and an openness to forms of engagement and being that makes the fullness of the free market and democracy in the post-Cold War order of today seem, by comparison, pale and predictable." John Borneman, Princeton University "These charming essays have an unintended consequence. Not only are they a documentary ethnography of the lives of people caught up in the painful transition from socialism to capitalism. They are also a sort of Bildungsroman of a young American discovering another world and shedding stereotypes." Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.