Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM, I’ll revisit my visit with the author of the final installment of a trio of thematically connected novels, a writer who readers of funny, smart, avant-garde literature know well, who other writers value and respect for his work as friend, colleague and booster of writing, and who students of creative writing adore for his mentorship of a long-running workshop at Santa Monica Monica College. He is also the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review, a terrific West Coast literary magazine. In Jim Krusoe’s new novel, Toward You, we return to the surreal community of St. Nils, where everything and nothingness live, this time with another lonesome bachelor protagonist --- dropout of the Institute for Mind/Body Research, furniture upholsterer and Rube Goldberg inventor --- who rescues a dying talking dog, struggles to construct a communication device with the dead and attempts love, reconciliation and forgiveness in this life and in the afterlife. What else from the author of a short story collection (Blood Lake) featuring not a metaphorical lake of blood but real blood, and two previous adventures with similarly doomed comic heroes trying to communicate, Girl Factory and Erased? Krusoe’s fiction is dream and wit, with deadpan sharpness that makes every page both wise affirmation and gratifying surprise. He is also the author of many volumes of poetry and the novel Iceland. For more visit the Tin House Books site: http://www.tinhouse.com/books/fiction-poetry/toward-you-print.html
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