Ken Kalfus has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and he has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of four novels, including 2 A.M. in Little America and Equilateral, and has published three short story collections. He has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books and his books have been translated into more than ten foreign languages. Born in New York, Kalfus currently resides in Philadelphia.
Sign up for occasional updates about this author
Books by Ken Kalfus
An irreverent, darkly comic novel dissecting the misjudgments, hypocrisies, and occasional good motives that drive our politics and our journalism, as well as our most intimate personal relations.
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.