Cream of Kohlrabi

Fiction. 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. "This is a brave, luminous, searingly unswerving vision of the life that exists so powerfully in those persistent dreams we have for ourselves, good and bad—those secret passions that seem strong enough to survive us, and that endure all the way out to the end of our lives.... These stories are not only brilliant, they are necessary"—Richard Bausch.