A Brief History of Living Forever

Ambitious, exciting … Kalfar knows his way around a sentence. By turns aphoristic and lyrical, with touches of Don DeLillo, Kalfar’s prose contains plenty of stylish wisdom … Mixing fantasy, satire, horror and metaphysics, A Brief History has many stories to tell. But the pulse animating each of them is the shock of sudden loss - of jobs, of loved ones, of a world you thought you knew – Frank Lawton * Daily Telegraph *Jaroslav Kalfar’s A Brief History of Living Forever is a book from the future, here to deliver an urgent story about the present. Extending the speculative logics of Franz Kafka’s Amerika and working in the dreamlike, psychic registers of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, Kalfar presents an entrancing, lucid, and incisive vision of immortality that starts and ends with the self-this is a brilliant, disorienting, and endlessly fascinating read – Tom Lin, author of the Carnegie Medal winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming TsuInventive and heartfelt, this dystopian take on the immigrant experience and the American Dream packs a walloping punch * Esquire *Ingenious … With a perceptive satirical slant and sharp humour, Kalfar builds a plausibly terrifying world * Publishers Weekly *A thoroughly original story from a writer to watch * LitHub *A dystopian romp with a tender centre … I didn’t want it to end – Kate Knibbs * Wired *

Jaroslav Kalfar was born in the Czech Republic and immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He earned his MFA at NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and a finalist for the E. L. Doctorow Fellowship. In 2018, he was selected for the National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. Spaceman of Bohemia, his critically acclaimed debut novel, was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. Spaceman, an adaptation of the novel, is forthcoming soon as a major motion picture. Kalfar lives in Brooklyn.

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