Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeys--the story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s. Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now...
Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, a...
"At once, names like Ionesco, Beckett, and Albee come to mind, but then are topped by the understanding that this voice has an even more unsettling, hard-hitting edge." -Phil Abrams
Instructions for Reading The Humble Assessment:
Step one: Take a deep breath.
Meet Mr. Humble. He is the sixteenth person to be interviewed for the position of Financial Controller. He needs this job. But he's not going to beg. Yet. Follow Kris Saknussemm, the masterful creator of Zanesville, Sinister Miniatures and Reverend America, on a dark and narrow path through the malign terrors of the modern...
"At once, names like Ionesco, Beckett, and Albee come to mind, but then are topped by the understanding that this voice has an even more unsettling...
(From the foreword by Kris Saknussemm) As with all the poets I most admire, words are living things for Tikuli. But as you will come to discover, they are never deployed for their own sake. She uses them to tell stories. The images, scenes, characters and fragments of visionary empathy that you will find in this book are all rooted in her native India-and yet they reach out far beyond national and cultural boundaries. They do so because they have an interior cohesion of spirit. Her subjects are often the dispossessed, the lost...the abused. There are undercurrents of sorrow and anger. And yet...
(From the foreword by Kris Saknussemm) As with all the poets I most admire, words are living things for Tikuli. But as you will come to discover, they...
