Floyd Skloot’s new book gathers sixteen stories that combine unsentimental comedy and forceful emotion. As in his award- winning poetry and memoirs, Skloot’s fiction shows how individual people, families, and communities face the starkest of challenges, including bodily maladies, the most harrowing of which often come with aging. Yet alienating experience can lead to moments of powerful intimacy, as dark times are lit by sudden incursions of love and hope, and a yearning for community summons poignant expression.

Floyd Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including two volumes of poems from Tupelo Press, and the acclaimed memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith (2008). The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, and other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg, live in Portland, Oregon. With his daughter Rebecca Skloot, he edited Best American Science Writing 2011.

Floyd Skloot was named one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers (January/February 2010): “Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and, in the process, makes us think about our own.”

“Skloot is such a fine writer that he can – and does -write about eating ‘baloney and eggs’ and makes it seem fascinating.” Publishers Weekly