Toward You - Softcover

Krusoe, Jim

3.55

92 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982569114 ISBN 13: 9780982569115

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2011

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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.

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About the Author:

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Parsifal, Toward You, Erased, Girl Factory, and Iceland; two collections of stories; and five books of poetry. 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 is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.

Review:

Krusoe’s sure and subtle imaginings of such characters yearning, isolated and finally enigmatic place him among the foremost creators of surreal Americana.”
The New York Times Book Review

"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 mad scientist, the man behind the curtain . . . Krusoe does something magical with regular words and regular life. His adjectives glow with possibility; the term 'fair-sized brown dog' takes on a sci-fi, suburban backyard glow, like an alien presence with a new language that sounds enough like our own to make us strain to uncover its meaning."
Los Angeles Times

It's a funny, quirky, darkly fascinating tale told with the skill of a wordsmith and the soul of a poet.”
Foreword

A surreal meditation on the afterlife.” Los Angeles Magazine

"Jim Krusoe’s plots are as quirky, charming, and original as his voice, which is saying plenty on both counts. He has the skewed perspective of Picasso, the sad heart of Keats, and the straight-faced mischief of The Outer Limits."
Book Slut

Every page hums with true emotion and genuine humanity.”
The Brooklyn Rail

"Jacobson writes that there should be no distinction between comic and serious novels, even though readers have 'created a false division between laughter and thought.' Over the course of this trilogy, Krusoe has proven that one is accomplice to the other, like a friend who gamely points to some fantastical sight in the distance, then socks you in the jaw."
The Rumpus

Jim Krusoe once again proves himself a master of dialogue, sublime wit, and unforgettable characters in Toward You.”
LargeHeartedBoy

Krusoe has a way with sketching witty vignettes with these desperate characters some goodhearted, others not that makes the reading enjoyable.”
Collected Miscellany

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