Monday, June 29: Jim Krusoe-palooza!!!

Starting at noon, it's one full hour of Jim Krusoe. He's a friend and mentor, writer and teacher, and citizen who has contributed greatly, generously to the life of literary culture in Southern California. With his most recent novels, Iceland, Girl Factory and, now, Erased, readers beyond our own region are discovering a fiction writer who poet Amy Gerstler calls one of our most sincere satirists...praise of at least two varieties. Promoted as the second installment in a trilogy about resurrection, Erased tells the not unlikely story --- not in Jim Krusoe’s funny, absurdist fiction --- of a man who receives a post card from his dead mother, inviting him to Cleveland, Ohio, where he finds mystery in a kind of simultaneous civic dreamland and nightmare, and also discovers social organizations that seem only to assure the hopelessness and nutty redemption of a fictional world that echoes Kafka and Barthelme, except even funnier. Jim Krusoe is the author of a short story collection, Blood Lake, and five books of poetry. He is the longtime popular teacher of creative writing workshops at Santa Monica College and founder of the Santa Monica Review. A year or so ago I had the pleasure of recommending Krusoe’s Girl Factory, to hear him read from it, and to speak with Jim Krusoe. So, after this new show, we'll replay that interview at 12:30. For more on the new novel, and to read an exerpt, go to the Tin House Books site: http://www.tinhouse.com/books/catalog_erased.htm.
Right now, please! Thanks for listening, and thanks to all who contributed to the recent fund drive in support of KPFK, Southern California's only truly community-sponsored radio station.