Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2016
176 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. From one of our great deadpan absurdists - a new member of the club to which George Saunders, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin belong - comes a book of unearthly delights that will have you, too, wondering nervously what that incessant grinding sound is." - Kirkus
"Ultimately, Krusoe is a superb entertainer with a Mad magazine-like appreciation for the absurd. His is a vision that stretches and expands in unexpected ways, leaving no aspect of popular culture untouched (Grape Nuts, The Fly and Soviet literature make welcome appearances.)" - Chicago Tribune
"Only a special kind of genius (or an idiot savant, as the book suggests) could dream this stuff up. I have no idea how be does it, but do it he does, and no one else can blur stupidity and significance with such sublime, funny and human results." - Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm
"The Sleep Garden is the wry, warped purgatory as Möbius Strip. You follow along the rolling, open road and suddenly you're upside down and backwards, staring at your own nether end. Sisyphean and webbed by permutations, the narrative ends just as the characters take charge of their lives. It's a brilliant, and poignant, rendering of white light." - Laura Glen Louis, author of Talking In The Dark
"Jim Krusoe is Franz Kafka's most brilliant literary descendant." - Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow
"Jim Krusoe's excellent The Sleep Garden [is] a brilliant wry comedy forever tilting toward tragedy - a dispatch from the dreamy edge of realism, as only Krusoe can tell it." - Ken Calhoun, author of Black Moon
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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