Ken Kalfus

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  • Christopher Morley's Philadelphia
    ISBN 0823212696 (0-8232-1269-6)
    Hardcover, Fordham Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    Christopher Morley was one of the most celebrated American authors of the 1920s and 1930s. Best known as the author of Parnassus on Wheels and Kitty Foyle, Morley wrote for a popular audience that keenly appreciated his style, his wit, and his exuberant championing of the written word. Morley wrote most of the pieces collected in this volume from 1918 to 1920, while a columnist for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. His assignment: to saunteraround town and the Philadelphia suburbs, and then - usually after a leisurely lunch - report back. The result was a series of lively essays that, read now, not only reveals a city's colorful past, but sheds light on its present: much of the Philadelphia Morley explored remains intact for the native or visitor with the eye and patience to discover it. Morley's best Philadelphia work, scattered among 12 volumes published during his lifetime, have been collected in this handsome new book, which includes period illustrations by Walter Jack Duncan and Frank Taylor, and a critical introduction by Ken Kalfus. Published on May 5, 1990, on the 100th anniversary of Morley's birth, Christopher Morley's Philadelphia brings together numerous essays that have been out of print for 50 years or longer. The book joins Fordham University Press's 1988 collection, Christopher Morley's New York, as a lasting contribution to the Morley oeuvre. [via]

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  • Christopher Morley's Philadelphia
    by Walter Jack Duncan, Ken Kalfus , Frank H Taylor
    ISBN 082321270X (0-8232-1270-X)
    Softcover, Fordham Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    Christopher Morley was one of the most celebrated American authors of the 1920s and 1930s. Best known as the author of Parnassus on Wheels and Kitty Foyle, Morley wrote for a popular audience that keenly appreciated his style, his wit, and his exuberant championing of the written word. Morley wrote most of the pieces collected in this volume from 1918 to 1920, while a columnist for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. His assignment: to saunteraround town and the Philadelphia suburbs, and then - usually after a leisurely lunch - report back. The result was a series of lively essays that, read now, not only reveals a city's colorful past, but sheds light on its present: much of the Philadelphia Morley explored remains intact for the native or visitor with the eye and patience to discover it. Morley's best Philadelphia work, scattered among 12 volumes published during his lifetime, have been collected in this handsome new book, which includes period illustrations by Walter Jack Duncan and Frank Taylor, and a critical introduction by Ken Kalfus. Published on May 5, 1990, on the 100th anniversary of Morley's birth, Christopher Morley's Philadelphia brings together numerous essays that have been out of print for 50 years or longer. The book joins Fordham University Press's 1988 collection, Christopher Morley's New York, as a lasting contribution to the Morley oeuvre. [via]

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  • Kalfus, Ken: The Commissariat of Enlightenment
    The Commissariat of Enlightenment
    by Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 0060501391 (0-06-050139-1)
    Softcover, Ecco Pr

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    With this remarkable debut novel, Ken Kalfus gives us a stunning triumph of invention -- an epic story about the death of two Russian visionaries, the life of a radical antihero, and the birth of a new kind of power.

    It begins in 1910 in Astapovo, a remote Russian railwaystation, where Leo Tolstoy lies dying of pneumonia. Members of the press from around the world have descended upon this sleepy hamlet to record his passing for a public suddenly ravenous for celebrity news. They have been joined by a film company whose young assistant, Nikolai Gribshin, is capturing the extraordinary scene and learning how to wield a camera as a political tool. At this historic moment he comes across two men -- the scientist, Professor Vorobev, and the revolutionist, Joseph Stalin -- who have bold, mysterious plans for the future that will inevitably involve him. With the coming of the Russian Revolution, Gribshin takes on the nom de guerre Comrade Astapov and joins the Bolshevik ministry of propaganda. In league now with Stalin and Vorobev, he plots to kill Lenin and glorify his embalmed body, promoting a vision of lifeless immortality that will dominate the minds of millions. In this brutal, absurd age, Gribshin seeks to transform himself and redirect the course of history.

    Displaying the same mastery of form and intimate knowledge of Russian culture that distinguished his award- winning short stories, Ken Kalfus has produced a work of grand scope and ambition. The Commissariat of Enlightenment is a mesmerizing novel of ideas that brilliantly links the tragedy and comedy of the Russian Revolution with the global empire of images that occupies our imaginations today. Filled with intelligence, humor, and rich, vivid storytelling, it firmly establishes Ken Kalfus as one of our most daring and talented writers.

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  • Kalfus, Ken: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
    by Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 1416522859 (1-4165-2285-9)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster, Limited

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    Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11and must swallow their disappointment when the other arrives home. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nations public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

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  • Envy
    by Marian Schwartz, Iurii Karlovich Olesha, Natan Altman, Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 1590170865 (1-59017-086-5)
    Softcover, New York Review of Books

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    A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

    One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella Envy brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.

    Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.

    Marian Schwartz's new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha's masterpiece. [via]

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  • Kalfus, Ken: Pu-239
    Pu-239
    by Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 0743400755 (0-7434-0075-5)
    Softcover, Washington Square Pr

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  • Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
    by Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 1571310290 (1-57131-029-0)
    Hardcover, Milkweed Editions

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    In his second book of short stories, Ken Kalfus takes on the speeding troika that is Russia in the 20th century. It's an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, displaying a range of subjects and techniques that would be remarkable in any writer, and is that much more so in one working in a tradition not his own. There are not one but many Russias in Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies: the giddy utopianism of the early Soviet Union; the postwar Stalinist personality cult; the brief thaw of '60s liberalism; and, perhaps most affectingly, the post-Gorbachev state, in which infrastructure crumbles while workers go unpaid. The title story begins with an accident in a nuclear plant and ends in unwitting apocalypse, as a technician dying of radiation poisoning attempts to sell weapons-grade plutonium on the black market. The result is part tragedy, part Fargo-style farce, featuring hoodlums so dumb they think they're dealing in drugs: "'What did he call it?' ... 'Plutonium. From Bolivia, he said.'" In "Anzhelika, 13," a young girl is convinced she has caused Stalin's death, while "Salt" is a satiric fairy tale about supply and demand. "Budyonnovsk" finds Viktor Chernomyrdin negotiating not with Chechen hostage-takers but with an exhausted, embattled Russian Everyman, Vasya, who is "old enough to know what a real job is, but not old enough to have ever had one."

    The short-story collection suits Kalfus; its eclecticism let him come at his subject from as many angles as he can dream up (and that's a lot). It's harder to sustain the same kind of imaginative momentum in a longer form, which makes the book's final novella an unexpected success. "Peredelkino" follows two writers through an intricate dance of literature, politics, jealousy, and desire, and then closes on a lovely and moving image. The narrator--discredited, disillusioned, his career finished--stands outside his own house "in the dark nowhere place from where authors always watch their readers." Inside is his wife, to whom he has been repeatedly and flagrantly unfaithful, oblivious to his presence but transfixed by his book:

    I knew that shortly there would be many explanations to be made, however imperfectly, and then confessions and recriminations, protestations of grief and loss, and then at last hard, practical calculation. Before that, I wanted to absorb, place in words that I would always be able to summon, an image of her like that, the passionate reader.
    In a sense, that's us he's looking at, absorbed in the book we've just finished. Kalfus is the kind of writer who can tip his hat to the reader--who can acknowledge our complicity--all without ever lifting us out of the world he's created. Most fiction speaks to either the heart or the head; his does both with ease. --Mary Park [via]

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  • Thirst
    by Ken Kalfus
    ISBN 1571310185 (1-57131-018-5)
    Hardcover, Milkweed Editions

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    Five stars and a 10-gun salute: Kalfus fractures the concept of traditional short fiction with this debut collection. Deservedly cheered by David Foster Wallace ("Infinite Jest"; "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"), Kalfus's audacious stories have both charm and vision in multiple formats that reflect fiction's fabulous future.

    The premier vignette, "Notice," explores the concept of "thirst," the interminable yearning that shapes human curiosity and achievement. Cynically set in the language of copyrights and legalese, "Notice" depicts the love life of the printed word, from its visceral seductiveness to our jealous control of its activities. In "Bouquet," a young au pair's aversion to open sexuality leads to a strange gift from a man who has been following her: a bouquet of flowers with a surprise that separates the prudish from the practical.

    "The Republic of St. Mark, 1849" is an absolute jewel, surprising in its juxtaposition of the horrors of war and the mystical capacity of the human spirit. Alexandro "has been dying his whole life," but the eerie weapons of balloons and braziers that torment his besieged city finally bring him to death's surprising threshold, lofted into thinnest air by his own imagination.

    Ken Kalfus quenches one's thirst for entertaining and intriguing fiction. [via]

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