Praise for Thirst
“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.”
“It’s exhilarating to discover a young writer with so much range and so little self-consciousness about exploring it. The publication of Thirst marks the debut of a major talent.”
“Thirst is a tense, driving narrative that may put some readers in mind of Hemingway’s best short fiction.”
“Slyly subversive… Kalfus unerringly recognizes the comedy inherent in our quandaries of knowing and being, and suggests that laughter best quenches existential thirst.”
“Kalfus himself is more shaman than politician—even when his stories rub up against geopolitical borders, he takes to the spiritual and dissolves them into magic. In this beautiful, varied volume of 14 stories and ‘routines,’ the well-traveled author launches himself far afield to tell his tales.”
“His debut story collection, Thirst, eludes all attempts at categorization save this one: It’s the bravest and most accomplished first book I’ve read all year. Each of the 14 stories in Thirst feels focused, pared down to its pure essences.”
“An intelligent and playful collection of stories that will move readers by engaging their sense of wonder and joy of exploration.”
“Thirst deftly explores a range of issues—from sexual desire and sleep disorders to the theatrical preparations for a drug trial. The 14 stories are comic, surreal, dark, nostalgic and uniformly excellent…. Kalfus creates a compelling momentum that leaves both Nula and the reader on the verge of a trance…. Let me be the first to suggest that Major League Baseball hire Ken Kalfus to concoct possible answers to all their lingering questions, both real and imagined. I’ll happily buy his answers.”
“Kalfus is as playful as postmodern masters Barthelme and Barth. Stories like ‘The Weather in New York’ are zingy with metafictional mayhem. Hilarious.”
“Playful, moving short stories about travel, childhood and loss, from a writer who does almost everything well. The story collection of the year. Really.”
Copyright
Interior design by Donna Burch
Typeset in Legacy Serif by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services
Printed on acid-free 30% post consumer waste paper by Versa Press.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
“Pu-239” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine
“Budyonnovsk” first appeared in News from the Republic of Letters
“Salt” first appeared in Bomb
© 1999, Text by Ken Kalfus
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55415. (800) 520-6455. www.milkweed.org
Published 2011 by Milkweed Editions
The extract on p. 236 is from Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of “Silentium,” by Fyodor Tyutchev, in Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev (New Directions, 1944). Copyright © 1944 by Vladimir Nabokov.
Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Milkweed Editions.
eISBN : 978-1-571-31822-0
1. Russia—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.A416524P8 1999
813’.54—dc21 99-18183
CIP
This book is printed on acid-free paper.