Klim spent his formative years as a space program physicist working on long-range satellites, and became a journalist. His work has been compared to John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Carl Hiaasen. His first novel, Jesus Lives in Trenton, became "a cult favorite satire on religious fanaticism". Klim said, "JLIT served as a litmus test, evoking people’s sense of God and religion by the title alone..." . Everything Burns is a fictionalized study of pyromania based partly on his experiences as a journalist. His novel The Winners Circle, a satire about the meaning of wealth in America, lead The Book Reporter to call him "among the top humor novelists of the day." His work has been praised repeatedly in publications such as Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.

In 2007, Klim became the executive editor of Best New Writing, which was said to "immediately become a treasured possession” by Walter Cronkite. He is a speaker on a range of topics from society to the writing craft. He was the lead editor in restoring the works of the American writer Eric Hoffer to print as well as editing American writer Robert Gover's later books. Klim is currently a professor of journalism at The College of New Jersey. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Association of Documentary Editors at the University of Virginia.

Klim chairs the Eric Hoffer Award for books and short prose. This award, from The Eric Hoffer Project, honors the American writer Eric Hoffer by "highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small publishers." The winning stories and essays appear in Best New Writing, and the book awards are covered in the US Review of Books, both produced by Hopewell Publications. The "Hoffer" honored prose is largely unpublished and the books are chiefly from small, academic, and micro presses, including self-published offerings.