Stuff
Product Details
Washington Square Press, September 1999
Trade Paperback, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0671034820
ISBN-13: 9780671034825
Description
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.
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Table of ContentsThe Village Voice
The most potent debut book I've read this year....The stories work something like poison: you touch them to your lips and you're instantly seduced.
David Foster Wallace
Ken Kalfus is an important writer in every sense of "important." 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, and the stories in Thirst manage simultaneously to delight, impress, provoke, and redeem.
The New York Times Book Review
Throughout this collection, the door is open to...unsettling ambiguity; always a tantalizing "perhaps" is in play...Ken Kalfus lights his stories with fundamental strangeness. The displaced figures in Thirst drift through worlds that are at once astonishing and familiar. They'd like to wake up in their own beds after a good night's sleep, but even that blessing would, we suspect, have the word "perhaps" in it somewhere.
Salon
A dazzling debut....With his amazingly eclectic story collection, Ken Kalfus emerges as a major literary talent....It's exhilarating to discover a young writer with so much range and so little self-consciousness about exploring it.
CityPages (Minneapolis/St. Paul)
Kalfus' grip on the story is so gentle that the story itself, like an unruly boy soft on the inside, always stays within the author's reach. But in the end, Kalfus surprises you, transports you to a different frame of mind
-- a sharp, clean turn in the story and you're left holding your breath, wondering how you got there.
Robley Wilson
This is a dazzle of a book...a kind of literary hit-and-run that keeps sideswiping the reader with surprise and wonder.
Miami Herald
Unexpect the expected: good advice for any reader who tends to judge a book by its publicity blurbs, but particularly apropos to Ken Kalfus' first venture into fiction. I can, though, confidently vouch for one thing to expect from Thirst: delight.
Boston Book Review
An intelligent and playful collection of stories that will move readers by engaging their sense of wonder and joy of exploration....Ken Kalfus resorts to fiction to accommodate what life can't accommodate
-- imaginary meanderings that the physical, phenomenological world makes impossible. He keeps contradictions and ambivalences in abeyance, forcing confrontation of possible and impossible worlds. He uses fiction, among other things, to address problems, without seeking to resolve them.
The New York Times Book Review
The stories in Thirst come at Ken Kalfus' readers from left of center, from surprising places not located on the banks of the mainstream....The fable "Invisible Malls" is a delicious fantasy......
Paper magazine
Playful, moving short stories about travel, childhood, and loss, from a writer who does almost everything well.
The Village VoiceKalfus is one of those rare writers whose travels haven't colored his prose with cosmopolitan cynicism....He reminds us that sometimes the really significant truths are those found closest to home.
Stuart DybekKen Kalfus is a writer with the rare, hermetic gift of traveling so effortlessly between the realm of experience and the realm of spirit and imagination that the boundary between them appears seamless. His stories are genuinely magical, that is, the transformations they work are real, not illusions. Thirst is a collection steeped in wonder.
American BooksellerKalfus waxes serious yet playful in his first collection....He has emerged on the American literary scene like a dark figure who stands off in some dark corner of the party with an expressionless but knowing look on his face. There's no joke, yet everybody else is laughing, or weeping.
Library JournalWell written, and very moving, these stories explore the common themes of love, family, duty, and class in a fresh and open manner so that one comes away with a new perspective on age-old questions.
San Jose Mercury-NewsKalfus is all over the emotional, stylistic, and geographic map, but he pulls it off, approaching each of the stories with the bright open-mindedness of a traveler in a new world.
Monthly News and ReviewsThirst is a collection of captivating fiction that reminds us that there are some truly talented writers out there who have the ability to draw us in and quench our thirst for the contemporary human experience.
Minneapolis Star-TribuneThe quality that gives a short story legs, the one that makes it memorable long after it was read, is naked imagination. And it is Kalfus'imagination -- so unique yet so universally applicable
-- that lifts the stories above the ordinary....He also has a very convincing ability to get inside the minds of fictitious others of very different backgrounds....
BooklistAt once fantastic, absurd, and satirical, Thirst is a perverse commentary on and comical prediction of American culture....The fourteen stories in this collection are stylistically wide-ranging, buoyed by witty narrators, diverse protagonists, and enticing settings: the locales range from New York to Paris, from a jungle in Southeast Asia to suburban Long Island. They engage the reader's attention and imagination from start to finish....
Publishers WeeklyKalfus veers between whimsical postmodern playfulness and a darker realism in the fourteen stories of his skilled, versatile first collection....Ambitious and daring, with smart, fluid prose and an abundance of surprises.
Huffington Post, December 30, 2009
...Ken Kalfus published his first book, 1998's Thirst, at age 44, after years as a professional writer, occasionally publishing stories in various publications, and following his journalist wife to Ireland ...
Ken Kalfus's Books
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Pu-239 And Other Russian FantasiesWith the publication of his first story collection, Thirst -- also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year -- Ken Kalfus made "a dazzling debut,"...Read More
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