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Save Me, Stranger
- Stories
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's Summary
From Edgar Award-winning author Erika Krouse, a visceral, dazzling collection of stories set across the globe, about characters desperate for salvation.
Erika Krouse's Edgar Award-winning 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.
What the critics say
“I really enjoyed this book. There are always questions about the advantages and disadvantages of first person narrators, but here the women who speak seem, paradoxically, so matter of fact and forceful that it’s difficult to believe anyone could tell their stories better. Some of their remarkable power is that the stories alternate between embodying epiphanies and valedictions—sometimes a quick goodbye, but always with an authenticity that convinces the longer it lingers. They’ll stay in your mind.”—Ann Beattie
“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
“The protagonists at the heart of this collection seem to hang, fingers clinging, on a high precipice, while the reader stands above in judgment and care, both at once. These characters, most of whom we meet in the wake of some serious existential disaster, do not always behave, or view the world, honorably—of course they don’t, given where they’ve come from. And yet, as we read their stories, it becomes clear that redemption might yet be in reach, if only someone would reach down and offer a hand. In our lonesome, suspicious times, Save Me, Stranger made me feel that there’s hope yet for our wretched souls. I’ll be thinking about these stories for a long time.”—Vauhini Vara