Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Yona Levin
Original language
English

2AM IN LITTLE AMERICA

Ken Kalfus

From “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.

One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he has had in years—a mysterious migrant named Marlise, who bears a striking resemblance to a onetime classmate.

Nearly a decade later—after anti-migrant sentiment has put their whirlwind intimacy and asylum to an end—Ron is living in “Little America,” an enclave of migrants in one of the few countries still willing to accept them. Here, among reminders of his past life, he again begins to feel that he may have found a home. Ron adopts a stray dog, observes his neighbors, and lands a repairman job that allows him to move through the city quietly. But this newfound security, too, is quickly jeopardized, as resurgent political divisions threaten the fabric of Little America. Tapped as an informant against the rise of militant gangs and contending with the appearance of a strangely familiar woman, Ron is suddenly on dangerous and uncertain ground.

Brimming with mystery, suspense, and Kalfus’s distinctive comic irony, 2 A.M. in Little America poses several questions vital to the current moment: What happens when privilege is reversed? Who is watching and why? How do tribalized politics disrupt our ability to distinguish what is true and what is not? This is a story for our time -- gripping, unsettling, prescient – by one of our most acclaimed novelists.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ken Kalfus is the author of 2 A.M. in Little America. He is also the author of three other novels—Equilateral; A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Commissariat of Enlightenment—and the story collections Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, the latter a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the basis for the HBO film Pu-239. He lives in Philadelphia.

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Book Published 2022-05-01 by Milkweed

Comments

“Ken Kalfus is American literature’s best-kept secret: his ideas are weird, his writing is limber, his ironic eye is gimlet, and yet no one seems to talk about him. Maybe that will change with [2 A.M. in Little America] . . . I’ve been waiting for a new novel from him since 2013’s insane, high-concept Equilateral, and I can’t wait to dig in.”—Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2022”

A migrant flees an imploded America, but he cannot escape its violent tribalism, his increasingly unreliable memories, or his American dreams. Having escaped the civil war that bloodied his hometown back in the states, Ron Patterson lays low, sharing a room with other migrants and repairing security systems in an unnamed foreign city. His visa status is problematic—Americans are now unwelcome internationally—but he escapes his loneliness with a woman who resembles someone from his past. Following an immigration crackdown, Ron lands in an enclave of American migrants trapped between competing militias, each insisting upon its own version of American history and suspicious of anything resembling middle ground. Confusion abounds. Familiar names are assumed by unrecognizable people, and such familiar places as chain restaurants and big-box retailers acquire horrific connotations. Crates of soybeans, America’s only permitted export, actually contain guns. Kalfus (Coup de Foudre, 2015) lived in war-torn Belgrade, and this novel captures the simultaneous electricity and tedium of a society galvanized by impending conflict. Kalfus’ grim, sharply on-target drama is brightened by moments of absurdity. Weird, dark, and clever.

"Perhaps Ken Kalfus, who has won all kinds of prizes but has so far received little attention from the general public, will finally make his breakthrough with this novel. After all, "Two A.M. in Little America" (but the book is not yet available in German) is a classic spy thriller: the reader turns the pages as if in a fever. At the same time, it is without a doubt high literature: question marks wherever you look; false bottoms under which poisonous secrets lurk."
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“2 A.M. in Little America is a highly readable, taut novel. It pulls the reader into its world, and suggests that many interesting human complications await us at the end of the story called the United States of America."
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In the end, the social commentary in this novel is particularly sharp, and there is much to contemplate... The dissolution of the United States and the end of American exceptionalism feels all too credible in Kalfus’ hands.
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"2 A.M. in Little America is my favorite book by one of America's great living writers. It is uncanny, insightful, thrilling, beautiful, and always overflowing with pleasures." --Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"In its melding of migration narrative, romance, and political thriller, Ken Kalfus's wondrous tale of a dystopian future, 2 A.M. in Little America, transforms home into a story we tell ourselves and others, one as subject to the failures of our memories as to the deceptions of our imaginations. Its tale of the collision between those narratives and real life innovates and turns pages, sings and whispers of its, and thereby our, Little Americas." --Elisa Rodriques, author of All the Water I've Seen is Running

"2 A.M. in Little America is the novel I didn't know I needed to read about my worst fears about the end of this country. This imaginative and immersive allegory of human intractability, memory, displacement, and the sinister potential of big-box stores is riotously funny and just as melancholy, unmistakable the vision of Ken Kalfus, a veteran chronicler of the doomed madness that is nationalism." --Asali Solomon, author of The Days of Afrekete

“Ken Kalfus may be the most underrated writer in America, consistently clever, creative, and compassionate. His latest novel is a Kafkan parable set during an indistinct future, after America’s political divisions have caused its collapse, losing its citizens as refugees into a largely uncaring world. Much reduced in circumstance, they cling to what they have left, their memories and the few empty cultural symbols that remain on their new darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and fight. Taught and highly provocative.”—James Crossley, Phinney Books

“Ken Kalfus captures the confusion and uncertainty that is ingrained within the refugee experience, and has transposed that experience into the life of an American in exile.”—Bob Lingle, Off the Beaten Path Bookstore

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country:
North America - Ecco/Harper
UK - Scribner
France - Plon
Italy - Fandango
Spain - Tusquets
Catalan - Empuries
Netherlands - Meulenhoff
Portugal - Asa
Czech - Euromedia
PolandSonia - Draga
Greece - Kedros
Turkey - Literatur Yayincilik
Serbia - Stylos

The Commissariat of Enlightenment:
North America - Ecco/Harper
UK - Scribner
Italy - Mondadori
Spain - Tusquets
Netherlands - Meulenhoff
Poland - Sonia Draga
Russia - Eksmo
Greece - Kedros
Turkey - Literatur Yayincilik

Thirst:
North America - Milkweed/Washington Square Press
Italy - Fandango Libri

PU-239:
North America - Milkweed/Washington Square Press
UK - Scribner
Italy - Mondadori
Poland - Sonia Draga
Israel - Kinneret

Kalfus (Equilateral) returns with a subtly provocative dystopian story. Ron Patterson, an adventurous young man living in a vaguely autocratic unnamed country, works a menial job inspecting rooftop security systems. While atop a skyscraper, he observes a nude woman through a window and hatches a plan to meet her. Part of the thrill of Kalfus’s engrossing story is in how he pieces together the details of his near-future world: America has “fallen,” and it’s not clear how; Ron pretends to be Canadian when meeting new people; and the streets are overrun by gangs. After a brief affair with Marlise, the woman Ron saw from the roof, he moves from one country to another, eventually settling in with fellow expats in a region he thinks of as “Little America,” which, like the old America, is chronically polarized and sometimes dangerous yet still feels like home. The slide into totalitarianism accelerates, as evidenced by a student protest that’s violently quashed by the military; citizens are so used to turmoil that it barely registers. Ron’s immersion in this changing country becomes an obsessive search for answers about the past, with everyone he meets reminding him of better days and triggering an aching nostalgia, which Kalfus makes emotionally charged. This low-key effort gradually takes hold on the reader.

From the undersung Kalfus, another tonally intricate triumph, this one about the bewilderment, alienation, and sheer strangeness of being a refugee.

Ron Patterson is an American who fled his native land as civil war and chaos descended. At the book's beginning he's a 20-something migrant in an unnamed country, eking out a subsistence as a repairman, having overstayed his visa, when he meets Marlise, another refugee. For a brief stretch before the unnamed country's politics turn fractious and they're banished and separated, she becomes a friend, companion, and temporary refuge, and he looks for her—or for her afterimage—everywhere he goes from then on. About 10 years later, having bounced from place to place while his homeland's civil conflict simmers on—and while xenophobic and tribal politics take root across the globe—Ron finds himself in one of the last nations that still welcomes castoffs from the once-great, once-smug power. He lives in a filthy banlieue he calls Little America, again in squalor, again with a steady job as a repairman of security-related electronics. The book is, as it keeps (nimbly) reminding us, a camera obscura: partly because indirect and tricky, bent, not-quite-trustable views are the nature of things; partly because of Ron's marginal and scorned status; partly because he's a loner; and partly due to an affliction that makes him see resemblances between people that may not be real (and on the flip side, differences that may not signify much), Ron can make out reality only indirectly, by way of mirrors and shades, and the image he ends up with is inverted, distorted, deeply mysterious. Then, when America's bitter political split starts to replicate itself even in the ghetto—and when he encounters a strangely familiar female schoolmate and is pressed into service as an informant by a detective—the picture gets murkier, scarier, and more peculiar yet. Kalfus has always worked by ingenious indirection; his A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) is a 9/11 novel as seen through the comic lens of an imploding marriage. Here he does so again, and with similar success, creating a commentary on current American politics that never sets foot in America, takes place in a distant future, and takes pains (as its protagonist does) to avoid the overtly partisan.

A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.

“Ken Kalfus is an important writer in every sense of ‘important.’ There are hip, funny writers, and there are smart, technically innovative writers, and there are wise, moving, and profound writers. Kalfus is all these at once.”―David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest

“Kalfus himself is more shaman than politician―even when his stories rub up against geopolitical borders, he takes to the spiritual and dissolves them into magic.”―Newsday

“Kalfus reminds us that the short story is not an easily contained form, a single thing done in a single way. . . . [He] lights his stories with this fundamental strangeness. . . . No one is comfortable in Kalfus’s universe, and no one is ever exactly at home.”―New York Times

“Kalfus unerringly recognizes the comedy inherent in our quandaries of knowing and being, and suggests that laughter best quenches existential thirst.”―Philadelphia Inquirer

“It’s a rare writer who can combine keen, grounded, psychological observation with visionary headiness, who can make you feel a character’s acute cultural dislocation without ever stooping to lectures―and an even rarer writer who can meld all of these elements into sinuous, powerful whole. . . . It’s exhilarating to discover a young writer with so much range and so little self-consciousness about exploring it.”―Salon

“Kalfus prove[s] himself to be one of those rare writers who manages to tackle lofty issues of transnational culture and capitalism with a gentle humanist touch, making his stories at once intellectually provocative and emotionally satisfying.”―Booklist

“Kalfus is not a political writer, really. He loves to tell stories, loves imaging other people’s lives and experiences, and we can sense this in the delicate unraveling of each plot, of each sentence. There is, among us, a storyteller―how rare a gift this is!”―Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men