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    PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
    Unavailable
    PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
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    PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
    Ebook307 pages5 hours

    PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

    By Ken Kalfus

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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 marketa 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’s ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateFeb 1, 2011
    ISBN9781571318220
    Unavailable
    PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
    Author

    Ken Kalfus

    ken kalfus is the author of a novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the short story collections Thirst, which won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

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    Reviews for PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      These are dark gritty stories of Russia's past, from pre-WWII through the cold war and into post Perostroika. They evoke a sense of familiarity of what we conventionally think of as an oppressive Soviet state, but these stories also let us imagine what it might be like to be entirely human during those times, and how one might have been inspired by the ideals of socialism, representing a notion of human development which is lost upon the present-day American mind.
    • 4/5
      I read the title story after hearing the HBO (or was it Showtime) movie was really good. The story is pretty good and ends with a great moment. I really like Kalfus's writing, so I'll be sure to finish this off in the near future.