Tales From the Liminal: Study Edition (Paperback or Softback)

Take your students for a dive into the liminal with the Tales From the Liminal Study Edition!

In this collection of 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.


In the Tales From the Liminal Study Edition you’ll get:

1. “Introduction to the Liminal” by Dr. Timothy Carson
2. Pre-reading and post-reading discussion questions for each story, by Dr. Matthew Flaherty
3. Liminal reflection and writing prompts
4. The following twelve stories selected from the original edition:

• Bigfoot’s Got a Lover

• The Birthday Party

• The Stretch Motel

• Mistakes May Have Been Made

• All He Could Do Is Sing

• When They Come for Me

• The Ferryman and His Brother

• She Saw Gertrude Stein in the Condensation on Her Window

• Goodbye, Bonavento

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

• The Unexpected Consequence of an Unsolicited Revolution

• Summoned by a Star

“If this imaginative world of S.K. Kruse creates more perplexity than certainty, literary sojourners should know that they have arrived in the right place. I know that happened for my students as we read, studied, and discussed this most delightful book.” — Dr. Timothy Carson, Honors College, MU, author of numerous books on liminality



“A sometimes dizzying, eclectic look at the hunger of the human soul for more. The collection at times feels like embodied philosophy, with perspectives contending … stirring up timeless questions you’ve forgotten, or the unformed whispers of questions you haven’t yet articulated.” — Dr. Matthew Flaherty, Literature Faculty, Bard High School, Early College Baltimore



“The diversity and power of these creations results in a collection that will delight literature readers who want consistently powerful examples of the short story form used to its greatest effectiveness. It delights with hard-hitting messages that linger in the mind long after their reading.” — Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review



“The world in Kruse’s new book is … both deeply strange and oddly familiar … a vast catalogue of philosophical ideas sprung from their hypothetical cages … tight, surreal stories carefully polished and compiled with singular purpose …” — Matt Geiger, multi-award-winning journalist and author of The Geiger Counter



“… 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.” — Timothy Cech, Reed Magazine



“Dazzling indeed are these startling stories set in perfectly configured twilight zones … Sentiments range from the horrific to the whimsical and contemplations of death are tempered by the marvelously evoked humorous voices of Kruse’s reliably eccentric narrators.” — Lee Siegel, author of Love in a Dead Language