A collection of stories features such topics as a typing bear, Gypsy kidnappings, the characteristics of an egg, and interspecies romance

Blood Lake and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Krusoe, Jim

United States

Boaz Pub

Jim Krusoe’s beset and bemused narrators are awash in a solution of Donald Barthelme’s worthy absurdities and Kafka’s mutating humor. In these surreal, dystopian tales, characters find their way into and out of Plato’s cave, mental hospitals, interspecies love affairs, plane crashes and Gypsy kidnappings. These narratives, which shapeshift and interpenetrate, contain everything form the rhapsodies of a night nurse, to a lyrical meditation on the egg, to lists of wryly named sexual positions. Krusoe’s universe is full of amazing chaos and deadpan astonishment.
When you enter Jim Krusoe’s wittily indeterminate world, your first instinct is to grope around for a literary coordinate. At first he reminds you of Kafka: the dreamlike inconsequentiality and gentle-sinister comedy―the half-human animals and evanescent temptresses. But the America that Krusoe inhabits is spelt with a C, not a K. He is robustly situated in his time and place, and he has a lilt that is all his own. In the end, he stopped reminding me of anyone. Jim Krusoe is an original. ― Martin Amis

New Harbinger Publications

Things don't always work out the way they ought to--or do they?--in this unsettling darkly comic novel. Filled with memorable characters, Girl Factory is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling. A yogurt parlor in a corner mall somewhere in the city of St. Nils contains a dark secret in its basement, and Jonathan, the mostly clueless clerk who works there, just wants to fix things once and for all. But, beginning with an early encounter in an animal shelter that leaves three dead, things don’t always work out the way they ought to. Or do they? Filled with memorable characters, including two dogs (one too smart for his own good) and a retired sea captain, this unsettling darkly comic novel is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling. More disturbingly, Girl Factory raises questions about the ubiquitous objectification of women, the possibility for change, and the nature of freedom.

Girl Factory

Humor & Satire

Tin House Books

When Theodore receives a postcard from his dead mother he sets out to track her down. Erased explores abandonment, life, death, and the transition between this world and the next. Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe's trilogy about resurrection. In Erased, Krusoe takes on a dead mother who mysteriously sends notes from the beyond to her grown son, Theodore, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business. "I need to see you," the first card reads. Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second card that's even more urgent, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. There, aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan's Samaritans, an all-girl biker club, he searches through the realms of women's clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing until he finds the answers he seeks.

Erased

Contemporary

The final book in Jim Krusoe's trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next. Toward You completes Jim Krusoe's bittersweet trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next. Bob has spent several years trying to build a machine that will communicate with the dead. He's gotten more or less nowhere. Then two surprising things happen: he receives an important message from a dog, and a former girlfriend, Yvonne, reenters his life. These events make Bob even more determined to perfect the Communicator, as he calls his invention, in the belief that it will change his friendless, humdrum life for the better. In the meantime, Yvonne's young daughter inhabits an afterlife she is trying to escape and would give anything to be reunited with her mom. Toward You is a poignant story of longing, mistakes, regret, disaster, and, above all, hope.

Toward You

Literary

The debut novel from the author of Blood Lake, a collection of short stories that was critically acclaimed and landed on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. An adventure in the absurd, Iceland begins with our narrator, Paul, arriving at a mysterious "Institute" to pick out - on doctor's orders - a new internal organ. There he meets Emily, a young, bikini-clad woman hired to stimulate the organs preserved in a nutrient-enhanced swimming pool, and falls in love amidst a flurry of chlorine and kick-boards. In Jim Krusoe's world, this is about as simple as life gets. Paul's brief interlude with Emily sets the course for his extraordinary adventures, which involve a troublesome stain on Paul's rug, a volcano, Paul's marriage and children, six years in a piano bar with a girl named Calypso Sally, and a long stretch in the State Penitentiary. But throughout it all Paul keeps re-imagining that first afternoon by the poolside with Emily, his one true love. Iceland is a novel of melancholic hilarity that raises serious questions along the way about the nature of memory, imagination, and desire.

Iceland (American Literature)

Krusoe, James

Dalkey Archive Press

Head-spinning and hilarious, Parsifal is a book like no other about the entanglement of the past and present, as well as the limitations of the future. There's a war going on between the earth and the sky, but that doesn’t stop Parsifal, a humble fountain-pen repairman, from revisiting the forest where he was raised. On his journey, Parsifal―a wise fool if there ever was one―encounters several librarians, a therapist, numerous blind people, and Misty, a beautiful woman who may well be under the influence of recreational drugs. Head-spinning and hilarious, Parsifal is a book like no other about the entanglement of the past and present, as well as the limitations of the future.

Parsifal

The Sleep Garden explores and pushes the boundaries between fact and imagination, real and surreal, and life and the afterlife. In an underground apartment building called “the Burrow”--essentially purgatory―“twilight souls” inhabit the space between life and death. Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain’s illegitimate son?), and the technicians who monitor the Burrow, making sure its occupants have a constant supply of oxygen and food. Through all of their stories, and the ways in which their lives, past and present, intertwine, Krusoe creates a poignant story about what constitutes a life, what remains when we die, and what we possibly carry with us into the next world.

The Sleep Garden

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Books by Krusoe, Jim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Krusoe, Jim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Blood Lake and Other Stories

Blood Lake and Other Stories

Girl Factory

Erased

Toward You

Iceland (American Literature)

Parsifal

The Sleep Garden