Quotes:
“Thirst
is a book to give to people who piss and moan about the unpromising
future of American fiction. It's the most exciting story collection
since George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; and Ken Kalfus is
an important writer in every sense of 'important.' There are hip, funny
writers, and there are smart, technically innovative writers, and there
are wise, moving, and profound writers. Kalfus is all these at once,
and the stories in Thirst manage simultaneously to delight, impress,
provoke, and redeem. Three cheers and then some.”—David Foster Wallace
“Kalfus reminds us that the short story is not an easily contained form, a single thing done in a single way.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Kalfus unerringly recognizes the comedy inherent in our quandaries of knowing and being, and suggests that laughter best quenches existential thirst.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Ken
Kalfus is a writer with the rare, hermetic gift of traveling so
effortlessly between the realm of experience and the realm of spirit
and imagination that the boundary between them appears seamless. His
stories are genuinely magical, that is, the transformations they work
are real, not illusions. Thirst is a collection steeped in wonder.”—Stuart Dybek
“It's a tense, driving narrative that may put some readers in mind of
Hemingway's best short fiction.”—Washington Post
“An intelligent and playful collection of stories that will move
readers by engaging their sense of wonder and joy of exploration.”—Boston Book Review
“The 14 stories in this collection are
stylistically wide-ranging, buoyed by witty narrators, diverse
protagonists, and enticing settings. . . . At once fantastic, absurd, and
satirical, Thirst is a perverse commentary on and a comical prediction
of U.S. culture.”—Booklist
“Kalfus himself is more shaman than
politician —even when his stories rub up against geopolitical borders,
he takes to the spiritual and dissolves them into magic.”—Newsday
“Kalfus is as playful as postmodern masters Barthelme and Barth. . . . Hilarious.”—St. Petersburg Times
“This is a dazzle of a book. The stories are mostly
brief —fantastical, funny, often lyrically wicked, in the quirky
tradition of a Lem, a Borges, a Calvino. But the talent all belongs to
Kalfus, and in Thirst he has created a kind of literary hit-and-run
that keeps sideswiping the reader with surprise and pleasure.”—Robley
Wilson, Editor of The North American Review
“His
debut story collection,
Thirst, eludes all attempts at categorization
save this one: It's the bravest and most accomplished first book I've
read all year. Each of the 14 stories in
Thirst feels focused, pared
down to its pure essences.”—
Daily Herald
