To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone - by Kathryn Kruse (Paperback)

About the Book

Reading this collection is an exercise of empathy and acceptance.

Book Synopsis

Call it Absurdist Realism. Call it Midwestern Gothic. Call it a book of stories that get a hold of your head and heart. Whatever you call it, To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone takes us to the edge of lived experience and guides us to look back in wonder at essential elements of humanness: hope, grief, confusion, joy. While the worlds and characters in each of these stories arrive fresh and distinct---A woman drives through Central Illinois returning lost baggage to airline passengers, accompanied by her mother's toothless mini-poodle; a couple finds their lives weighed with 3D printings of their baby's fetus after a miscarriage; a rag-tag group spends every day together in an abandoned and repurposed pharmacy, the shelves still filled with out-dated stock, while they up-skill for promised minimum-wage jobs---we grab hold of a throughline: the book spills over with people building and breaking idols to find love and survival where they can. And we cheer them on at each step.

Review Quotes

The stories in Kathryn Kruse's collection startle with their attention to our most elemental selves: our bodies, our work, our health, our language. We share these traits with the characters, and what's startling is not so much the familiar moments as the ways in which moments both familiar and unfamiliar intersect and entangle themselves into unusual arrangements. There are the insistent e-mails in one story promising money, power, and love, and the ways in which they seem addressed to one particular person, with one particular name, until they replicate and multiply. It could be anyone, you think. It could be you. There are familiar corporate vistas and workshops and culture, all of them turned strange and beautiful as we run through the possibilities of living here, right now, in late capitalism---the injuries and victories of "Fun Land," for example, or the narrator of the title story, who asks that you be dying and alone. The stories suggest that one of these requirements is true and inevitable, the other maybe less so. We're never fully alone, this extraordinary collection suggests. Someone's always trying to reach us. These stories are wonderful reminders of that truth---shockingly accurate, bracingly funny, wonderful company all around.

-Juan Martinez, author of Extended Stay

The stories in To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone are as compelling as I've read in recent memory. Driven by compassion, fueled by a passionate intelligence, Kathryn Kruse's fictions make the reader pause and consider the depths of their humanity. There is much humor and pathos in To Receive My Services. Above all, there is grace and beauty. Read this book and be changed by it.

-Pablo Medina, author of The Cuban Comedy

Kathryn Kruse's new collection of stories is dizzying and provocative. Through razor sharp writing, she depicts a world in which grief leads a man to taxidermy his late wife and where a minstrel finds love with a series of literal logs. But intimacy is the soul and subject here, and it manifests in surprising, revealing ways, such as a tender imaginary backrub between videochat lovers. Throughout, she never takes her foot off the gas, and, even at their darkest, every story, like the ride in "Fun Land," which features a misanthropic nurse on duty for a theme-park catastrophe, is a dervish of fun!

-Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman