- Paperback: 205 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 edition (19 July 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571197019
- ISBN-13: 978-0571197019
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,808,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A collection of stories whose concerns range from love and poetry to baseball, and the wide variety of settings includes a rain-drenched Third World jungle and a plague-ridden Renaissance Venice. In a homage to Italo Calvino, an inventory of shopping malls is recounted by Marco Polo to Kubla Khan.
From the Publisher
Other authors' comments on 'Thirst'
"'Thirst' is a book to give people who piss and moan about the umpromising future of American fiction. It's the most exciting story collection since George Saunder's 'CivilWarLand in Bad Decline';and Ken Kalfus is an important writer in every sense of "important." There are hip, funny wirters, 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. Three cheers and then some. --David Foster Wallace
"This is a dazzle of a book.The stories are mostly brief--fantastical, funny, often lyrically wicked, in the quirky tradition of a Lem, a Borges, a Calvino. But the talent all belongs to Kalfus, and in 'Thirst' he has created a kind of literary hit-and-run that keeps sideswiping the reader with surprise and pleasure." --Robley Wilson
"Ken Kalfus is a writer with a 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. --Stuart Dybek --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"'Thirst' is a book to give people who piss and moan about the umpromising future of American fiction. It's the most exciting story collection since George Saunder's 'CivilWarLand in Bad Decline';and Ken Kalfus is an important writer in every sense of "important." There are hip, funny wirters, 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. Three cheers and then some. --David Foster Wallace
"This is a dazzle of a book.The stories are mostly brief--fantastical, funny, often lyrically wicked, in the quirky tradition of a Lem, a Borges, a Calvino. But the talent all belongs to Kalfus, and in 'Thirst' he has created a kind of literary hit-and-run that keeps sideswiping the reader with surprise and pleasure." --Robley Wilson
"Ken Kalfus is a writer with a 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. --Stuart Dybek --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
The fourteen stories here (all previous published in various lit reviews) display an amazing range of styles and a great deal of promise. There is whimsical comedy is the opening two and half page "Notice" and in the faux records of "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz". There is a liberal dose of fantastical elements, such as the never-ending snowstorm of "The Weather in New York", the mysterious nomads of "A Line Is A Series of Points", or the dual-existence protagonist of "Night and Day You Are the One." There is also the unfortunately presence of the literary joke story "Invisible Malls" (a pastiche of the Italian writer Calvino's Invisible Cities), and a weak meaning semi-historical Borgesian effort "The Republic of St. Mark, 1849."
Kalfus's more "realistic" stories are equally uneven. The stories "Bouquet" and "Thirst" cover an encounter in Paris between an Irish nanny and an Moroccan, and are totally run-of-the-mill. The longest story is "No Grace On the Road" (at 40+ pages), a very awkwardly done story set in Vietnam about a young upper-class official caught in a storm out in the countryside with his American wife, and forced to shelter in a peasant's hovel, where a baby lies dying. It's a really clumsy piece, worthy of a college freshman writing class. On the positive side of the ledger, the brief "Cats in Space" is a simple and haunting story of kids being cruel to neighborhood animals. "Suit" is another short but sweet piece, about a boy being fitted for a suit for a court appearance. "Rope Bridge" is probably the most conventional story in the collection, concerning a man who lusts after a vivacious friend of his wife. But Kalfus treats the material with care and simplicity, creating an exquisite short work.
So, a typical first collection of very good pieces and some very bad pieces, with an atypical range of of styles and settings.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
An exciting discovery
14 April 2000
Format:Paperback
There is always something exciting about stumbling across hidden treasure - finding something rich and wonderful when you least expect it. Kalfus is a wonderful secret - quietly writing some of the most imaginative and diverse short fiction I've read recently. It's a great book for those who want to look cool holding a book by an author few people have heard of yet, but it's an absolute must for anyone who loves to get lost in a story and hasn't read anything very original in a long time.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Mixed Bag of Tricks
17 July 2003
Format:Paperback
The fourteen stories here (all previous published in various lit reviews) display an amazing range of styles and a great deal of promise. There is whimsical comedy is the opening two and half page "Notice" and in the faux records of "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz". There is a liberal dose of fantastical elements, such as the never-ending snowstorm of "The Weather in New York", the mysterious nomads of "A Line Is A Series of Points", or the dual-existence protagonist of "Night and Day You Are the One." There is also the unfortunately presence of the literary joke story "Invisible Malls" (a pastiche of the Italian writer Calvino's Invisible Cities), and a weak meaning semi-historical Borgesian effort "The Republic of St. Mark, 1849."
Kalfus's more "realistic" stories are equally uneven. The stories "Bouquet" and "Thirst" cover an encounter in Paris between an Irish nanny and an Moroccan, and are totally run-of-the-mill. The longest story is "No Grace On the Road" (at 40+ pages), a very awkwardly done story set in Vietnam about a young upper-class official caught in a storm out in the countryside with his American wife, and forced to shelter in a peasant's hovel, where a baby lies dying. It's a really clumsy piece, worthy of a college freshman writing class. On the positive side of the ledger, the brief "Cats in Space" is a simple and haunting story of kids being cruel to neighborhood animals. "Suit" is another short but sweet piece, about a boy being fitted for a suit for a court appearance. "Rope Bridge" is probably the most conventional story in the collection, concerning a man who lusts after a vivacious friend of his wife. But Kalfus treats the material with care and simplicity, creating an exquisite short work.
So, a typical first collection of very good pieces and some very bad pieces, with an atypical range of of styles and settings.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Super!! An exciting new collection of outstanding writing
12 Aug 1998
Format:Hardcover
Ken Kalfus is a terrific writer, a great stylist who can make any topic interesting. The first story -- "Notice" -- transforms the standard copyright notice paragraph found at the beginning of most books into a mini-story on the nature of memory. Other stories may seem experimental -- like the terrific "Invisible Malls" which pays tribute to Calvino's "Invisible Cities" -- but at their heart they always reveal truths about human nature. Highly recommended!
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