Equilateral: A Novel - Softcover

Kalfus, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408832933 ISBN 13: 9781408832936

Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus, 2013

Synopsis

Equilateral is a concise book motivated by an expansive idea: contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. It's the late nineteenth century, and British astronomer Sanford Thayer has won international funding for his scheme to excavate an equilateral triangle, three hundred miles to a side, from the remote wastes of Egypt's Western Desert.

Nine hundred thousand Arab fellahin have been put to work on the project, even though they can't understand Thayer's obsessive purpose. They don’t believe him when he says his perfect triangle will be visible to the highly evolved beings who inhabit the planet Mars, signaling the existence of civilization on Earth. Political and religious dissent rumbles through the camps. There's also a triangle of another sort—a romantic one involving Thayer's secretary, who's committed to the man and his vision, and the mysterious servant girl he covets without sharing a common language. In the wind-blasted, lonely, fever-dream outpost known only as Point A, we plumb the depths of self-delusion and folly that comprise Thayer's characteristically human enterprise.

Illustrated throughout with black-and-white astronomical diagrams, Equilateral is an intellectual comedy that's extravagant in its conception and intimately focused on the implications of Empire, colonization, exploration, the Other, and who that Other might someday be.

About this title

Review:

'Wry, humane, precise and beautifully smitten with ideas' -- Jonathan Franzen on The Commissariat of Enlightenment

'There are hip writers, there are technically innovative writers, and there are wise, moving, and profound writers. Kalfus is all of these at once' --David Foster Wallace

'When a new Ken Kalfus novel appears I stop eating, drinking, shaving and breathing until I finish it. Equilateral is one of his smartest and most ambitious books yet. It left me thinking and wondering well past my bedtime' -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

'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.' --Stuart Dybek

'Ken Kalfus is a talent to watch' -- Sunday Telegraph

'Kalfus has a demonic imagination. The glamour of consistent disaster is recognizable in every line, every scene, every lacquered articulation: it is what we moderns like to call a neo-classical construct. I'm overcome by the splendor of what he's done' --Richard Howard

Book Description:

From National Book Award finalist Ken Kalfus, an elegant, irreverent novel about the centuries-old quest for interplanetary communication.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1408832933
• ISBN 13: 9781408832936
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224