Jim Knipfel: 5 books

From the irresistibly droll mind of Jim Knipfel comes These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales, a series of twisted fables that echo with pinpoint acuity. A masterful storyteller whose memoirs and novels have earned him widespread acclaim, this is Knipfel’s first foray into...

Monster Stalks NYC When a local drunk is mugged near the toxic Gowanus Canal by “a hulking, hairy beast who smells really bad,” Hank Kalabander thinks nothing of blaming the assault on the legendary Bigfoot. His sardonic crime blotter for The Hornet, a local Brooklyn rag, often gleefully...

Wally Philco is a gentle, midlevel insurance industry operative living with his wife, Margie, in Brooklyn. In the years since those terrible events took place in Tupelo, Mississippi, though, the world -- and Brooklyn, too -- has become a very different place. Nobody's sure exactly what happened on...

In the nearly twenty years that Leonard Koznowski has been sheriff of Beaver Rapids, Wisconsin, he’s never encountered a homicide. When the local mortician and his assistant are brutally gunned down, Leonard is thrust into a tumultuous investigation linking religion, high school athletics, the...

Meet Roscoe Baragon–crack reporter at a major (well, maybe not that major) metropolitan newspaper. Baragon covers what is affectionately called the Kook Beat–where the loonies call and tell him in meticulously deranged detail what it’s like to live in their bizarre and lonely world. Lately Baragon’s...