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Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-57131-029-3
Pages: 272
Publish Date: Dec, 1999
Genre: Fiction
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
BY Ken Kalfus
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.”
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR:
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
From one of America's great contemporary writers, an award-winning collection of short stories.
Read more ›
Thirst
Short tales distinguished by black comedy and international perspective in a collection from a marvelously inventive and distinctive new voice.
Read more ›
“Kalfus is a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life.”
—New York Times Book 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“Kalfus prove[s] himself to be one of those rare writers who manages to tackle lofty issues of transnational culture and capitalism with a gentle humanist touch, making his stories at once intellectually provocative and emotionally satisfying.”
—Booklist (starred review)“Imaginative, densely detailed stories that open a window in a world perhaps more remote now than ever before.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“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“Kalfus is not a political writer, really. He loves to tell stories, loves imagining other people's lives and experiences, and we can sense this in the delicate unraveling of each plot, of each sentence. There is, among us, a storyteller - how rare a gift this is!”
—Boston Book Review
