Jim Krusoe

Toward You (Tin House)

The wonderful storyteller and local favorite Jim Krusoe returns with a new book! 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, but then two surprising things happen: he receives an important message from a dead 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. "Krusoe's surrealistically skewed, oddly affecting novel blurs the borders between life and the afterlife, what's real and what's imagined, to highly entertaining effect. . .A seriously strange, funny and affecting novel about imagining another life while being stuck in this one." —Kirkus Reviews Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Erased, Girl Factory, and Iceland. His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, the Chicago Review, the Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, and other publications. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS APRIL 5, 2011.