"In this book, Kalfus plucks individual lives from the stew of a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he hawks a most unusual package on the black market - a canister of weapons-grade plutonium ("Pu-239").

In "Orbit," the first cosmonaut navigates several items not on the preflight checklist as he prepares to blaze the trail for the new communist society, "floating free of terrestrial compromise." In "Budyonnovak," a young man hopes desperately that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Set in the 1920s, "Birobidzhan" is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world's first Jewish state.

The novella, "Peredelkino," which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political."--BOOK JACKET.