Join me for a joint reading with R.L. Maizes, most recently the author of A Complete Fiction! Details here: https://www.inkberrybooks.com/calendar/2025/dec1225.htm

Inkberry Books: December 12th at 7:00 PM

Authors Erika Krouse and

R.L. Maizes

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Save Me, Stranger

by Erika Krause

From the coldest town on earth to a sex shop in Bangkok to a haunted bed-and-breakfast in the Rockies, we meet characters at hinge moments. A runaway fights for her future while driving an ice-cream truck in gang territory; a cleaning woman investigates the teenager who died in her stead; a terminal patient in Alaska discovers new life in helping others die. This collection explores the borderlands between humor and hurt, community and self, and hope and despair, redefining what it means to survive.

Scalpel-sharp, unsparingly funny, and achingly wise, Krouse's expansive stories build to unforgettable emotional catharses, as these men and women must decide how far they are willing to go to save one another--and themselves.

A Complete Fiction

by R.L. Maizes

With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a "nibble" on the trendy new social-media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication.

The nibble shoots to the top of the site's Popular Menu Items and before you can say "unpaid literary labor," George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy. P.J.'s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed her sister Mia's secrets in the book? Some diners on Crave think so, and now it's P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.

Told in the humorous vein of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, A Complete Fiction examines the very serious questions of who has a right to tell a story, and has cancel culture gone too far in our social media-drenched world?

Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction: Save Me, Stranger; Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation; Contenders; and Come Up and See Me Sometime. Erika’s memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, is a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award. Erika mentors for the Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.

R.L. Maizes is the author of A COMPLETE FICTION, a novel forthcoming Nov. 4, 2025, from Ig Publishing. Her novel OTHER PEOPLE'S PETS won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020, and she is the author of the short story collection WE LOVE ANDERSON COOPER. Her short stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and the recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2024-2025 for her novel-in-progress.