Thunderstruck & other stories

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Something

Summary

From the author of the beloved novel The Giant's House'finalist for the National Book Award'comes a beautiful new story collection, her first in twenty years. Laced through with the humor, the empathy, and the rare and magical descriptive powers that have led Elizabeth McCracken's fiction to be hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times Book Review), "funny and heartbreaking" (The Boston Globe), and "a true marvel" (San Francisco Chronicle), these nine vibrant stories navigate the fragile space between love and loneliness. In "Property," selected by Geraldine Brooks for The Best American Short Stories, a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish the Maine rental house they were to share together by removing his landlord's possessions. In "Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey," the household of a successful filmmaker is visited years later by his famous first subject, whose trust he betrayed. In "The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston," the manager of a grocery store becomes fixated on the famous case of a missing local woman, and on the fate of the teenage son she left behind. And in the unforgettable title story, a family makes a quixotic decision to flee to Paris for a summer, only to find their lives altered in an unimaginable way by their teenage daughter's risky behavior. In Elizabeth McCracken's universe, heartache is always interwoven with strange, charmed moments of joy'an unexpected conversation with small children, the gift of a parrot with a bad French accent'that remind us of the wonder and mystery of being alive. Thunderstruck & Other Stories shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers. Advance praise for Thunderstruck & Other Stories "[Elizabeth] McCracken's short stories are like no others. Her distinctive voice, her slightly askew manner of looking at the world, her mix of mordant humor and tenderness, her sense of life's ironies, and the jolt of electricity at the end of each tale make her work arresting and memorable. . . . Readers will enjoy reading them twice'the first time quickly, because the plots are mesmerizing and strange, and the second to relish the dozens of images, apercus, and descriptions. . . . McCracken transforms life's dead ends into transformational visions."'Publishers Weekly (starred review) Praise for The Giant's House National Book Award finalist "This book is so lovely that, when you're reading, you'll want to sleep with it under your pillow."'Salon "Such is the incantatory power of McCracken's eccentric tale that by its close we are completely in the grip of its strangely conceived ardor. . . . I was reminded at various points of Harper Lee, Marjorie Kellogg, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy."'The New Yorker Praise for Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry "Funny and heartbreaking . . . a terrific book . . . You could gulp [these stories] like heart-candy."'The Boston Sunday Globe "There's . . . a real grace of language here'a knack for quirky, precise description. . . . McCracken [has an] engaging voice, [a] sharp eye for those moments when the grotesque hides behind the unexceptional'and [an] ability to persuade us that what appears most unlikely is often most illuminating, and frequently most true."'Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times.

Contents

Something Amazing
Property
Some Terpsichore
Juliet
The House Of Two Three-legged Dogs
Hungry
The Lost & Found Department Of Greater Boston
Peter Elroy: A Documentary By Ian Casey
Thunderstruck.

Published Reviews

Booklist Review: "Twenty years after her first collection of stories (Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry!, 1993), McCracken returns to short fiction with this collection of nine marvelously quirky, ironic, but, most of all, poignant stories. A young woman befriends a lonely, eccentric children's librarian, who is then devastated when the young woman is found murdered. An English couple who moved to France deed their house to the husband's son from his first marriage, and he later sells it out from under them, leaving them essentially homeless. A woman cares for her granddaughter in Iowa while her son, the girl's father, is dying in a Boston hospital, and neither is able to say goodbye. A woman who lives with her aging father and teenage son disappears into thin air, leaving her son reduced to stealing frozen pizzas from the corner market. Though her characters may seem strange, McCracken paints them with such rich detail that it feels as if we must know them, after all so immersed in their lives do we become in just a few pages.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2014 Booklist"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "McCracken's short stories are like no others. Her distinctive voice, her slightly askew manner of looking at the world, her mix of mordant humor and tenderness, her sense of life's ironies, and the jolt of electricity at the end of each tale make her work arresting and memorable. In this collection of nine short narratives (McCracken's return to short fiction 20 years after Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry), a feckless, improvident father mourns the unwitting example he has set for his son; a grieving mother finds solace in a neighbor's child, while that child's mother is about to undergo a tragic loss; and a librarian has to live with a disastrous memory. In the title story, a father who must come to terms with his daughter's brain injury muses: "Happiness was a narrow tank. You had to make sure that you cleared the lip." These stories, set in France, Massachusetts, Maine, and Iowa, are macabre yet anchored by precise details and psychological insight; they turn on ironic twists of fate and seesaws of luck. Readers will enjoy reading them twice-the first time quickly, because the plots are mesmerizing and strange, and the second to relish the dozens of images, apercus, and descriptions (a handsaw is "a house key from a giant's pocket"; "His hair looked like it had been combed with a piece of buttered toast"; "Amazing how death made petty disappointments into operatic insults"). McCracken transforms life's dead ends into transformational visions. Agent; Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved."
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Additional Information

Subjects	Short stories, American Short stories Literature Short Stories Fiction Electronic books.
Publisher	New York :Random House Publishing Group,2014 Random House Publishing Group2014
Other Titles	Short stories. Thunderstruck and other stories
Contributors	OverDrive, Inc.
Language	English
System Details	Mode of access: World Wide Web. Format: Adobe EPUB eBook Format: Kindle Book Format: OverDrive READ Requires Adobe Digital Editions or Amazon Kindle
Description	1 online resource
ISBN	9780812995961 9780812995961
Other	Classic View