Forgiveness (2007)
Turning headline news into biting social satire, Jim Grimsley exposes the amorality of materialistic America in Forgiveness, a blackly comic tale of a bankrupt accounting executive who dreams of achieving stardom in the only way a pathetic failure can—by murdering his wife. As Charley Stranger imagines the crime, he fantasizes wildly unlikely encounters with celebrities—sharing marital woes with Nicole Kidman over a latte at Starbucks, being interviewed by Barbara Walters—while in real life his wife Carmine incessantly ridicules his inability to perform either in bed or in the marketplace. As Forgiveness veers to its shocking conclusion, it strips bare the corruption of the American Dream—the moral bankruptcy of corporate and political institutions, the hollowness of living in a media-saturated world, the delusion of buying love with luxury goods.

The Ordinary (2004) -- Winner, 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
The Twil Gate links two very different realms. On one side of the portal is Senal, an advanced technological civilization of some thirty billion inhabitants, all cybernetically linked and at war with machine intelligences many light-years away. On the other side is Irion, a land of myth and legend, where the world is flat and mighty wizards once ruled.  Jedda Martele is a linguist and trader from Senal. Although fascinated by the languages and cultures of Irion, she shares her people's assumption that Irion is backward and superstitious and no match for her homeland's superior numbers and technology. But as the two realms march inevitably toward war, Jedda finds herself at the center of historic, unimaginable events that will challenge everything she has ever believed about the world---and herself.

Boulevard: A Novel (2002)

Kirith Kirin (2000) -- Winner, 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Horror

Comfort & Joy: A Novel (1999) -- Finalist 2000 ALA's GLBTF Book Award for Literature

My Drowning (1997) -- Winner Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award

Dream Boy (1995)  -- Finalist Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction; Winner of the 1996 ALA's GLBTF Book Award for Fiction

Winter Birds (1994) -- Finalist PEN/Hemingway Award and winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Mr. Universe and Other Plays (1998) -- Winner George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright; Winner Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers
In this collection, critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley reveals his great gifts as a playwright in four powerful, award-winning plays presenting different worlds in collision and convergence. In "Mr. Universe," the rescue of a mute bodybuilder from the gritty streets of New Orleans by a couple of drag queens brings out the best and worst in them. In "The Lizard of Tarsus," an imprisoned Jesus (called J.) is interrogated by an ambitious follower, Paul of Tarsus. In "The Borderland," neighboring families representing two very different social classes are brought together during a storm. And in "Math and Aftermath," the two worlds of pornography and nuclear testing collide during a film shoot in the Marshall Islands. These plays (introduced by Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, Kaye Gibbons, and Craig Lucas) demonstrate the differences that are matters of perception; together they establish Grimsley as a dramatist with imagination and nerve.