Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

The story about Sergei Korolev’s journey from the gulag, recounted in “Orbit,” is drawn from James Harford’s masterful biography, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon .

My fable “Salt” is based on one collected in Russian Fairy Tales, selected by Aleksandr Afanasev. The story’s epigraph is taken from Robert Cottrell’s article “Kremlin Capitalism,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books, March 27, 1997.

No full accounting of my debts would be complete without mention of the Philadelphia Inquirer foreign desk, which named my wife, Inga Saffron, Moscow bureau chief in 1994, and thus sent our family on an extraordinary four-year adventure. The respect the Inquirer holds for the written endeavor extends beyond the perimeters of its staff, and I’m grateful for much incidental and vital support.

And I thank Inga, who was, as always, my stories’ first reader.

KEN KALFUS is the author of two novels, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a National Book Award finalist, and The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Thirst, his first story collection, won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies was a Times Notable Book and also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The title story won a Pushcart Prize and was adapted as a film for HBO.

Kalfus is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and resides in Philadelphia with his family.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

Thirst

“Thirst is a book to give to people who piss and moan about the unpromising future of American fiction, 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.”

“Kalfus’s stories are genuinely magical, that is, the transformations they work are real, not illusions. Thirst is a collection steeped in wonder.”

“Kalfus reminds us that the short story is not an easily contained form, a single thing done in a single way.”

“ Thirst eludes all attempts at categorization save this one: It’s the most accomplished first book I’ve read all year.”

“Kalfus unerringly recognizes the comedy inherent in our quandaries of knowing and being, and suggests that laughter best quenches existential thirst.”

For more information, contact Milkweed Editions at (800) 520-6455 or visit www.milkweed.org.

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1979, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.

In addition to revenue generated by the sales of books we publish, Milkweed Editions depends on the generosity of institutions and individuals like you. In an increasingly consolidated and bottom-line-driven publishing world, your support allows us to select and publish books on the basis of their literary quality and transformative potential. Please visit our Web site ( www.milkweed.org) or contact us at (800) 520-6455 to learn more.

Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from Amazon.com; Emilie and Henry Buchwald; the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Foundation; Timothy and Tara Clark; the Dougherty Family Foundation; Friesens; the General Mills Foundation; John and Joanne Gordon; Ellen Grace; William and Jeanne Grandy; the Jerome Foundation; the Lerner Foundation; Sanders and Tasha Marvin; the McKnight Foundation; Mid-Continent Engineering; the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; Kelly Morrison and John Willoughby; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Navarre Corporation; Ann and Doug Ness; Jörg and Angie Pierach; the Carl and Eloise Pohlad Family Foundation; the RBC Foundation USA; the Target Foundation; the Travelers Foundation; Moira and John Turner; and Edward and Jenny Wahl.

“Kalfus is a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life—the dull, brute clatter surrounding the soundless vacuum—and its social, environmental and spiritual self-destruction.”

“So full of pleasure and wonder from sentence to sentence and page to page that it touches the reader physically.”

“It starts with a nuclear accident and ends with a low-watt hoodlum snorting lines of plutonium. Kalfus populates Pu-239 with the gods and monsters of the decomposing Soviet Union.”

“Kalfus is a writer who has the ability and the perverse desire to render fiction unfamiliar, difficult, and therefore new. One is often reminded of Kafka—another writer whose work’s vitality derives from its essential strangeness.”

“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.”

“There is, among us, a storyteller—how a rare a gift this is!”

“In story after story Kalfus moves from a sense of disorientation to moments of paralyzing lucidity.”

“Kalfus shows a striking talent for transcultural understanding, and for depicting the very strange.”

“ 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.”

“These stories are genuinely magical, that is, the transformations they work are real, not illusions. Thirst is a collection steeped in wonder.”

“One of the most potent debut books of this year.”

“Ken Kalfus reminds us that the short story is not an easily contained form, a single thing done in a single way…. The displaced figures in Thirst drift through worlds that are at once astonishing and familiar.”