Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies

Author's Bio:

Ken Kalfus lived in eastern Europe and Moscow for much of the 1990s and visited areas of Russia recreated in this book. He is the author of Thirst (Milkweed Editions, 1998) and has written book reviews and articles for a number of publications. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

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