Tales From the Liminal

The Collection

Bigfoot’s Got a Lover

The Birthday Party

Man Posts Picture of Unusual Rock then Gets Call from Concerned Parties

When They Come for Me

Mistakes May Have Been Made

All He Could Do Is Sing

She Saw Gertrude Stein in the Condensation on Her Window

The Ferryman and His Brother

Goodbye, Bonavento

The Stretch Motel

I Followed Schrödinger’s Cat and Here’s What I Found

My Streak of Nobody

The Unexpected Consequence of an Unsolicited Revolution

The Carousel

Summoned by a Star

Listen to the WPR Central Time Interview

Skip to the 25:50 timestamp!

The Blurb

In this collection of fifteen curious and delightful short stories, you never know who you’re going to meet or where you’re going to end up. You can be certain, however, that you’ll always find yourself smack dab in the middle of some befuddling predicament of existence.

Using humor and horror, satire and allegory, fabulism and realism, Tales From the Liminal takes you for an extraordinary ride, submerging you in spaces where anything is possible, especially transformation.

So What is the liminal, anyway?

THE LIMINAL is a time, place, or state of being that’s transitional. (Though you can get stuck there, so watch out for that.)  It’s often described as “betwixt and between” or “neither here nor there.” If it’s a time, it could be the summer you graduate from high school before you leave for college, a stint of unemployment, a war. If it’s a place, it could be an elevator, airport, staircase, or hallway. If it’s a state of being, you’ve got soul work to do. You didn’t end up there by accident. Some new thing is emerging in you, and for that to happen, some old things need to die away. Darkness, confusion, and disorientation are to be expected. Don’t be afraid though. Let the liminal do its work. You’ll be glad you did.

The Audiobook Sample

A 5-minute audiobook sample of Tales From the Liminal by S. K. Kruse, featuring “Mistakes May Have Been Made,” “She Saw Gertrude Stein in the Condensation on Her Window,” and “Summoned by a Star.”

Listen to the WPR Newsmakers Interview

“It’s a breed of storytelling that encases an entire cosmos within a compact form, with prose that pulses with life, with tableaus that transfix the imagination with glimmers of divine order in an emotionally turbulent landscape. Placed in the care of Kruse’s clear and commanding style, the pain and resentment carried by common people is infused with uncommon humanity even as their environment becomes tinted by the surreal.”

 --Timothy Cech, fiction editor, Reed Magazine