Three Stories
The murderer had glared defiance at the judge and jury. He turned to stare down the courtroom spectators, one by one. Even his lawyer, a future suicide, cringed from Ganz’s regard.
Three brilliant and wide-ranging new stories from Ken Kalfus. ‘Professor Arecibo’ is a brief, distressing account of a man who observes everything. ‘The Un-’ offers a merciless look at the life of an aspiring author, surrounded by so many others like him and the stacks of blank pages on his desk. And in ‘The Moment They Were Waiting For,’ residents of a city discover the dates of their deaths, both upending and fastening the arcs of their lives.
‘There are funny, hip writers, and there are smart, technically innovative writers, and there are wise, moving, and profound writers. Kalfus is all these at once.’
— David Foster Wallace
‘Kalfus is an ironist in the best late-modern Central European style: wry, humane, precise, and beautifully smitten with ideas.’
— Jonathan Franzen
‘It is not moral complexity or clashes of opinion that interest Ken Kalfus, but the driving force of single ideas, the power of images to reconstitute what we call history.’
— Barry Unsworth, The New York Times
Ken Kalfus is the author of two collections of stories, Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, and two novels, The Commissariat of Enlightenment and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award.