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 American corporate machine. He will show you a fish bowl full of crickets. He will show you a tarantula as big as a suburban home. He will show you a woman in a black lace bra, a man in a gorilla mask. The Humble Assessment is a masterpiece of modern theatre. In a few short pages, Saknussemm will take you in, make you comfortable, then rip your heart out before you even notice he's been holding a dagger the whole time. Meet Mr. Humble. They've been watching him his whole life

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 gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times...

The extraordinary meditation on Europe by the "brilliantly illuminating" (Alain de Botton) public intellectualBy the author of Zanesville, a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage.Detective Birch Ritter is a man on the edge-of himself. His past is filled with secrets, shadows, guilt, and ghosts. Then a dubious police buddy he hasn't seen in a year introduces him to a mysterious woman who says her business is shadows. What she knows about what lies between the darkness and the light inside men is more than Ritter may want to find out, and much more than he can resist learning. It's said that to try to forget is to try to conceal, and concealing evidence is a crime. But maybe revelation is another kind of crime-against nature.Kris Saknussemm, the widely acclaimed author of the sci-fi smash Zanesville,, now delves into another genre, and another world-a world where even the sunlight is shadowy and where deviancy is the...