Jim Krusoe Questions Your Commitment
Jim Krusoe is the author, most recently, of Erased. He reads on August 20th at the St. Mark's Bookshop Reading Series.
For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what's the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
“Jim Krusoe is one of America's most sincere satirists, a treasured literary oddball. No one interweaves the comic, the absurd, the tearjerk-y, the outrageous and the mundane or plays them off each other the way he does. It's been said that a truly unique literary production proposes its own genre. Surely that's true of Jim Krusoe's Girl Factory, which twists tropes from Frankenstein, Bluebeard, contemporary headlines, old movies, the biology of extinction, the self help movement, conspiracy theory and more into a highly readable, unpredictable postmodern novella that always privileges unadulterated imagination.” -Amy Gerstler
What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?
At the risk of becoming clichéd I think change is hard to come by and permanent change impossible to promise.
Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn't look at you screwy)?
Henry Adams.
Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Well, not starving, but really, really poor. It most certainly did not make me brilliant, but there is something to be said for testing one's commitment. If a person works for five, ten, twenty, thirty years with neither "success" nor wealth, they'd better have a reason.
What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
I want the reader to be taken aback at first by a character, and then in the end recognize a part of themselves.
Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
I once wrote a paper back in college where I misspelled the title. The result did not go a long way toward establishing my credentials.
