Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

“Kalfus is a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life—the dull, brute clatter surrounding the soundless vacuum—and its social, environmental and spiritual self-destruction.”

—New York Times Book Review

“So full of pleasure and wonder from sentence to sentence and page to page that it touches the reader physically.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“It starts with a nuclear accident and ends with a low-watt hoodlum snorting lines of plutonium. Kalfus populates Pu-239 with the gods and monsters of the decomposing Soviet Union.”

—Esquire

“Kalfus is a writer who has the ability and the perverse desire to render fiction unfamiliar, difficult, and therefore new. One is often reminded of Kafka—another writer whose work’s vitality derives from its essential strangeness.”

—San Diego Union Tribune

“Kalfus is that rare writer of fiction whose passages of description feel like action; it’s as if he were injecting his readers with a serum that renders them, in a rush, intimately familiar with the texture of the Russian experience.”

—Salon

“There is, among us, a storyteller—how a rare a gift this is!”

—Boston Book Review

“In story after story Kalfus moves from a sense of disorientation to moments of paralyzing lucidity.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Kalfus shows a striking talent for transcultural understanding, and for depicting the very strange.”

—Publishers Weekly