A Brief History of Living Forever

'Ambitious, exciting . . . touches of Don DeLillo' Daily Telegraph

'A Kurt Vonnegut-like satirical touch' New York Times

'Inventive and heartfelt . . . packs a walloping punch' Esquire

Adela, diagnosed with a terminal illness, leaves her Czech village for America to reunite with her daughter Tereza, now a scientist at a New York biotech company hellbent on curing mortality. Their reunion is short, and before Tereza can help her mother, Adela dies and her remains disappear.

But Adela's spirit survives, restlessly watching over Tereza as she searches for the body on a journey that spans oceans and continents, through a world ravaged by corporate greed and political extremism. Witty and prescient, A Brief History of Living Forever is a vivid story of family connection prevailing in the face of societal collapse.

Praise for SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA:

'Funny, human and oddly down-to-earth' Guardian

'A superb debut' Literary Review

'Booming with vitality and originality' New York Times

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 Tsu
Inventive 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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