In this new book of fiction, Ken Kalfus plucks individual lives from
the stew of a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales
that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing
title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he hawks a
most unusual package on the black market—a canister of weapons-grade
plutonium (Pu-239). In “Orbit,” the first cosmonaut navigates several
items not on the pre-flight checklist as he prepares to blaze the trail
for the new communist society, “floating free of terrestrial
compromise.” “Budyonnovsk” skewers the turbulent relationship between
Moscow and Chechnya. “Salt” is an economic fairytale, featuring kings,
princesses, and swiftly melting currencies. The novella, “Peredelkino,”
which closes the book, traces the fortunes of an editor/critic during
the liberalizing 1960s who faces, among other things, the prospect of
reviewing a trilogy of historical fiction by one “L. I. Breshnev.”
Quotes:
“Imaginative, densely detailed stories that
open a window in a world perhaps more remote now than ever before,
Kalfus's crafty, nerve-ratttling tales are among the most unusual and
interesting now being written.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Kalfus channels the emotional plenitude of
Chekhov as well as Gogol's wry comedy—in short, he gets a good portion
of the Russian heart on paper. . . . These Russian moral dilemmas possess
an immediacy that belies their setting in a distant land under a nearly
forgotten spell.”—Albert Mobilio, VLS (writers on the verge, 1999)
“Kalfus
shows us the heart of Russian people against the tumultous backdrop of
Soviet history. . . . Hopefully, it won't be long before readers see a
novel from this master storyteller.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Kalfus is that rare writer
of fiction whose passages of description feel like action; it's as if
he were injecting his readers with a serum that renders them, in a
rush, intimately familiar with the texture of the Russian experience.”—Salon
“Ken Kalfus is an American writer who doesn't seem
to know he's an American writer. . . . With his latest collection, Kalfus
turns to one of the most elusive and enigmatic countries and perhaps the
most unlikely setting for an American author to situate an entire work:
Russia. But Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies is so full of pleasure
and wonder from sentence to sentence and page to page that it touches
the reader physically. . . . Ken Kalfus has arrived.”—Andrew Roe, San
Francisco Chronicle
“The
stories in this ambitious collection—inspired by Kalfus's four years
in Moscow—reveal the author's prodigious range. . . . These are Russian
fantasies to savor.”—Mother Jones
“It is exceptionally difficult
for a foreigner to write fiction about Russia and get it right. Ken
Kalfus gets it right. Again and again. . . . What makes these stories work
is a crafty—often absurd—combination of reality and fiction. And a
gift for describing telling details.”—Russian Life
“With his
debut collection, Thirst, . . . Ken Kalfus proved himself to be a
virtuosic literary carpetbagger, as well as one of the freshest new
voices in American short fiction. . . . Pu-239 projects us into a Russia
as incandescent and lethal as a canister of plutonium—one both more
real and more fantastic than has previously been imagined.”—Donovan
Hohn, Civilization
“The
jewel of this collection is its eponymous first story. . . . Kalfus shows
a striking talent for transcultural understanding, and for depicting
the very strange; fans of Paul Bowles, or of Kalfus's earlier
collection, Thirst, won't want to miss these new tales.”—Publishers
Weekly
“The realities
Kalfus evokes can be so darkly surreal that, even at their most direct
and devastating, they mimic the mind's hazy meditation.”—Rain Taxi
“What
is most wonderful about the variety of these stories is Kalfus's
restraint. While Kalfus is an American author, this is not Russia as
seen through American eyes, at least not as one might expect it. . . .
Instead, Kalfus imagines and writes a series of stories that are much
more difficult to tell, and thus, all the more worth reading.”—Paul
Maliszewski, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“A writer's writer, Ken Kalfus
is a reader's writer, too, crafting stories so densely detailed, so
profoundly touching, so embedded in the absurd, the exotic and the
obscure, that those who venture in will not escape the blaze that
greets them.”—Philadelphia Magazine
