Ken Kalfus is the author of 2 A.M. in Little America. He is also the author of three other novels—Equilateral; A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Commissariat of Enlightenment—and the story collections Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, the latter a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the basis for the HBO film Pu-239. He lives in Philadelphia.
An Esquire “Best Book of Spring 2022”
A Publishers Weekly “Best Book of Summer 2022”
A Kirkus “Best Book of May 2022”
A San Francisco Chronicle “Most Anticipated Novel of 2022”
A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2022”
From “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.
One of America’s great contemporary writers—called “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life” by the New York Times—serves up tales at once hair-raising, comic, and fabulous. From a nuclear power plant worker to the first cosmonaut, this collection offers a moving and kaleidoscopic portrait of the Russian people through a century of turbulent history.
These stories mine a vast terrain of geography and metaphor, sketching portraits of people caught in the seismic collision of cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired. Witty and fantastical, hip and wise, this first collection by a major talent brings wonder and imagination into the realm of experience.
