Save Me, Stranger
Stories
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From EDGAR-AWARD WINNING author Erika Krouse, a VISCERAL, DAZZLING collection of stories set across the globe about characters desperate for salvation
“Far-ranging and visionary collection...A dozen little masterpieces of heart and longing and surprise.” —ADAM JOHNSON
“Save Me, Stranger is a book of parables—supernal and sinister. Disturbing but comforting. Read these stories with a buddy, because someone will have to scrape you off the floor.” —LOUISE ERDRICH
Erika Krouse's debut memoir, Tell Me Everything, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “lyrical, jarring, propulsive,” and the Washington Post as “mesmerizing on every page.” Now, with an electrifying new collection of stories, Save Me, Stranger, she further cements her reputation as an essential voice.
From the coldest town on earth to a sex shop in Bangkok to a haunted bed-and-breakfast in the Rockies, we meet characters at hinge moments. A runaway fights for her future while driving an ice-cream truck in gang territory; a cleaning woman investigates the teenager who died in her stead; a terminal patient in Alaska discovers new life in helping others die. This collection explores the borderlands between humor and hurt, community and self, and hope and despair, redefining what it means to survive.
Scalpel-sharp, unsparingly funny, and achingly wise, Krouse's expansive stories build to unforgettable emotional catharses, as these men and women must decide how far they are willing to go to save one another—and themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krouse (Tell Me Everything) delivers an affecting if occasionally schematic collection in which characters find help out of various states of despair. In the title story, a teenage boy intervenes during an armed robbery in a convenience store after the thieves take a woman hostage, sacrificing himself so she can stay with her 10-year-old daughter. The robbers shoot him, and before he dies, he utters the name Olivia, prompting the woman and her daughter to search for Olivia and tell her about his heroism. "Eat My Moose" follows two terminally ill veterans, Bonnie and Colum, who illicitly assist others with similar health conditions in death by suicide. The satisfying work offers Bonnie and Colum reprieve from the pain of their cancers, up until the story's poignant conclusion. As the collection's title suggests, strangers often bring salvation, though the situations aren't always mortal. In "The Piano," a middle-aged woman is offered a chance to play again after giving up the instrument decades earlier, when her parents deemed it impractical. Krouse sets up the recurring motif a bit too neatly at times, but in the volume's best entries she makes the thrill of new beginnings palpable ("the relentlessness of the current, a stranger's hand, and that strong pull back to life"). This is worth a look.
