Cream of Kohlrabi

by Floyd Skloot

Overview

Floyd Skloot's new book gathers sixteen stories that combine unsentimental comedy and forceful emotion. As in his award- winning poetry and memoirs, Skloot's fiction shows how individual people, families, and communities face the starkest of challenges, including bodily maladies, the most harrowing of which often come with aging. Yet alienating experience can lead to moments of powerful intimacy, as dark times are lit by sudden incursions of love and hope, and a yearning for community summons poignant expression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936797059
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	09/30/2011
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Floyd Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including two volumes of poems from Tupelo Press and the acclaimed memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith (2008). The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, and other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg, live in Portland, Oregon. With his daughter Rebecca Skloot, he edited Best American Science Writing 2011.

Hometown:

Amity, Oregon

Date of Birth:

July 6, 1947

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A., Franklin & Marshall College, 1969; M.A., Southern Illinois University, 1971

Website:

http://www.floydskloot.com

Editorial Reviews

Starred Review.

In this breathtaking collection of sixteen intimate stories by award-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist Skloot (The Wink of Zenith), characters struggle with their failing bodies and minds-and the ensuing loss of dignity-while demonstrating their will to live. Skloot's humane approach reveals the truth of each character's condition as well as the challenges of everyday life for the sick and aging-all to haunting and powerful effect. In "Plans," a dying man tries to make future plans with his family, especially attending an opening night Mariners vs. Red Sox game in Seattle. In "The Tour", a mother in a nursing home looks forward to a trip to Fire Island with her daughter and leaves herself small notes in order to jog her memory: "Had she greeted him? It was too awful, this failure to know what was happening in her life. If you can't remember, Esther thought, you can't think. And if you can't think, you aren't living." Skloot's subtle, vividly descriptive stories allow his characters glimmers of hope and strength amidst the pain. Readers can't help but be moved.
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