It's the late nineteenth century, and British astromer 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 ather 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 kwn 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 astromical diagrams, Equilateral is an elegant intellectual comedy that's extravagant in its conception and intimately focused on the implications of empire, colonization, and what we expect from contact with the other.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN-10
1620400162
ISBN-13
9781620400166
eBay Product ID (ePID)
189912857
Additional Product Features
Content Note
Black & White Illustrations
Author Biography
Ken Kalfus is the author of two novels, The Commissariat of Enlightenment and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He's also published two collections of stories, Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His books have been translated into more than ten foreign languages. He lives in Philadelphia.
