Product Code Database
Richard Kalich, the author of The Nihilesthete (1987), Penthouse F (2010) and Charlie P (2005) published in 2014 in a single volume as Central Park West Trilogy, The Zoo (2001) and The Assisted Living Facility Library (2019). He has been nominated for the National Book Award and for a Pulitzer Prize. His novels are internationally acclaimed and widely translated: his novels have been published in Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and Japan. Kalich was born and lives in New York City where he co-directs a film company with his twin brother, Robert Kalich.
Charlie P, the main character of this absurd, hopeless, funny, and terrifying novel, decides, at age three, when his father dies, to overcome mortality by becoming immortal: by not living his life, he will live forever. From then on, his whole life and his tragi-comic misadventures happen only in his mind.
"He's after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one's culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream."Brian Evenson on RICHARD KALICH’S Charlie P. Bookforum. FEB/MAR 2006. Brian Evenson
"Kalich represents the best in contemporary fiction. He has every chance to become- why not? - a living classical author."Charlie P. //Hooligan Literary Magazine. January 2005. No. 1 (34) Hooligan Literary Magazine, Moscow
"Speaks with a singular honesty, power and eloquence about our spiritually diminished modern world."Kalich, Richard The Nihilesthete Reviewed by Paul Jablon v vIII, no. 1, Mid-American Review Mid-American Review
"A brilliant, hammer-hitting, lights-out novel." Los Angeles Times
"As important and original a novel to have been written by an American author in a generation." Mid-American Review
"A major American writer." Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Remarkable . . . the aesthetic effect is a bit like having the wind knocked out of you." Richard Fuller
"Penthouse is akin to the best work of Paul Auster in terms of its readability without sacrificing its intelligence of experiment. … Kalich delivers afresh, relevant, and enticingly readable work of metafiction." American Book Review
"Thrilling and confusing in equal measure, Penthouse F is an important book that dismantles the reader, leaving you in fragmented bits and pieces like the barbed clips that make up the novel’s structure." Colin Herd,
"Ghosts haunt this book from the first page to last: Dostoevsky, Mallarme, Kafka, Mann, Camus, Pessoa, Gombrowicz--and, oh yes, most perniciously of all, "Kalich." For he is a man who tortures himself both with the novels he has written and with those he has not. Let us forgive him even if he will not forgive himself, recognizing as we do the one truth of this tale that seems to be beyond doubt: "It was all in his head like everything else about him." Warren Motte, World Literature Today
"A marvelous book. It manages to do in a short novel what the great postmodernists like Coover and Barth take five or six hundred pages to do." Brian Evenson
"If one of the great European intransigents of the last century - say, Franz Kafka or Georges Bataille or Witold Gombrowicz - were around to write a novel about our era of reality TV and the precession of simulacra, the era of Big Brother and The Real World, what would it look like? Well, it might look like Richard Kalich’s Penthouse F." Brian McHale
"In the strange, sometimes frank ways that Robbe-Grillet and Cooper and Acker approach a kind of lurking moral presence in their work, Kalich too creates something somehow both spiritually clouded and passively demanding: what is going on here, in this business of words, and people? The answer, perhaps both political and existential, whether you agree with one side or the other, operates in the way texts I most often enjoy to get wrapped up in invoke: a door that once opened, is opened, and you can’t get it all the way back shut, try how you must. This is a book, a body of work, an author, deserving a new unearthing eye." Blake Butler, HTML Giant
"With his continuous comic exaggeration, Kalich is able to describe, highly uniquely, the overwhelming, vertiginous, risky sensation of being alive."Stacey Levine reviews Richard Kalich’s Charlie P. American Book Review, Volume 27, No. 5. July/August 2006. URL: http://americanbookreview.org/issueContent.asp?id=7 American Book Review
"Like most good comic novelists, Kalich is adept at teetering on the precipice wherein he might decide to dilute the fun with the grim, creating that suspense where things might get really bad at any moment." Rain Taxi Review of Books
"Kalich after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one’s culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream. And this tension between dream and reality makes Charlie P a deliciously painful book." Bookforum
"I would rather that the familiar be embraced and the novel resonates beyond itself and intone the spheres of Plato and Beckett. Charlie P resonates."Gerdes, Eckhard. Richard Kalich. Charlie P. (Book review). Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2006. URL: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/64990928?q=+&versionId=78093524 Review of Contemporary Fiction
"Kalich has written the definitive novel on the stupidity of intolerance" - Marion Boyars
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