Bøger af Ken Kalfus

From “one of America’s great living writers” (Jonathan Safran Foer), a prescient, high-stakes novel dissecting the ways we tell stories—privately and publicly—amid radical social change.At his desk one day, prominent Washington journalist Adam Zweig receives a text message. “Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news,” it reads. “call soonest.” These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm initiated by fellow journalist Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and liberal icon Max Lieberthol. Twenty years have passed since the incident, and though Adam wasn’t directly involved, he quickly finds himself implicated, entangled, and ultimately questioning his moral, personal, and professional standing.For Adam has a history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration gradually tipped into flirtation, and then into mutual passion. Or so he thought. Confronted by the actions of his former boss and a growing awareness of rampant sexism in his industry, Adam, who had always thought of himself as progressive, is forced to cast a critical light on his own assumptions and behaviors over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what then seemed like a casual encounter in truth played a part in derailing a young woman’s promising career.Fascinating, tense, and scrutinous, Big Swinging is a close-quarters account of our changing media landscape, and what happens when one finds oneself on the wrong side of an awakening.

Kalfus plucks individual lives from the stew of a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he hawks a most unusual package on the black market -- a canister of weapons-grade plutonium. In "Orbit," the first cosmonaut navigates several items not on the preflight checklist as he prepares to blaze the trail for the new communist society, "floating free of terrestrial compromise." In "Budyonnovsk," a young man hopes desperately that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Set in the 1920s, "Birobidzhan" is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world's first Jewish state. The novella, "Peredelkino," which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political. Together, these works of fiction capture the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. They display Kalfus' ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.

In "the story collection of the year" (Paper magazine), Ken Kalfus mines a vast terrain of geography and metaphor to create a stunning series of portraits of people caught in the seismic collision of cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired. With his "magical, transformative, and captivating" (Boston Book Review) mix of fantasy and dark humor, Kalfus has crafted an extraordinary collection that is, by turns, hilarious, mysterious, and touching.

Russia, 1910. Leo Tolstoy lies dying in Astapovo, a remote railway station. 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 cinematographer, Nikolai Gribshin, is capturing the extraordinary scene and learning how to wield his 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 radical, mysterious plans for the future. Soon they will accompany him on a long, cold march through an era of brutality and absurdity. 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.

A National Book Award Finalist"The best novel yet about 9/11.... A brilliant new comedy of manners, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own." --Salon"Savagely hilarious." --ElleJoyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11--and 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 nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

It is the turn of the twentieth century and a British astronomer, Thayer, high on Darwin and other progressive scientists of the age, arrives in Egypt to embark on the project of a lifetime: the excavation of a triangle in the desert, with sides hundreds of miles long, to be filled with petrol and set alight. The purpose: to send out a signal to life on Mars (for which he has evidence) that humans exist. But as work progresses, the huge task force of Egyptian workers is struck by disease and rebellion, and the success of Thayer's project looks increasingly uncertain.