Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and Niagara Falls All Over Again. A former public librarian, she is now a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin, and has received grants and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin. Elizabeth is married to novelist and illustrator Edward Carey.
All Books By Elizabeth McCracken
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Elizabeth McCracken
- Length: 3 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 10, 2008
- Language: English
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4.18(5255 ratings)
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don’t — but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.
With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.
Bowlaway
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Kate Reading
- Length: 12 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: February 05, 2019
- Language: English
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3.11(4651 ratings)
A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley.
From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century–nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person–Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark–with Bertha its most notable resident.
When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha’s defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills.
In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family’s myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.
... Read moreHere’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Kate Reading
- Length: 6 hours 36 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: February 05, 2019
- Language: English
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3.99(897 ratings)
The singular, enchanting debut story collection from Elizabeth McCracken, now back in print as part of Ecco’s “Art of the Story” series, and with a new introduction from the author.
Called “astonishingly assured” by The Guardian, the nine stories that make up Elizabeth McCracken’s debut story collection deal with oddball characters doing their very best to forge connections with those around them.
In “It’s Bad Luck to Die” a woman marries an older tattoo artist and finds comfort in agreeing to act as a canvas for his most elaborate work. “Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware” follows a young girl as she comes face to face with a cast of eccentrics her recently-widowed father has invited to live in their expansive but dilapidated home. And in the title story, a young man and his wife are perplexed when an outspoken old woman shows up on their doorstep for a visit, claiming to be a distant aunt, even though she can’t be traced on a family tree.
At once captivating and offbeat, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry is a dazzling showcase of the early years of Elizabeth McCracken’s prodigious talent.
... Read moreNiagara Falls All Over Again
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Elizabeth McCracken
- Length: 13 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: March 10, 2008
- Language: English
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3.67(1057 ratings)
Sometimes in life, opposites are drawn to each other–somehow, each providing the other with something they don’t have, but desperately need. National Book Award finalist Elizabeth McCracken pens this graceful, moving tale of an unlikely pairing of two men and their lifelong partnership in show business. Drawn to Vaudeville from a Jewish upbringing in a small town outside Des Moines, Mose Sharp meets Rocky Carter at a comedy club. Missing his usual sideman, Carter enlists Sharp to participate in his routine. On stage, Carter’s hilarious emotional exaggeration and absurdity come into their own with Sharp’s deadpan delivery–and just like that, the inseparable duo of Carter and Sharp is born. From Broadway to Hollywood in 1939, the duo finds great success in movies before a series of unforgivable acts tears them apart. Filled with compassion and beauty, Niagara Falls All Over Again builds up intensely before life’s toll harkens the bittersweet unravelling of Carter and Sharp. With the experienced voice of veteran narrator George Guidall, McCracken’s prose finds its perfect complement.
... Read moreThe Giant’s House
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 11 hours 9 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: December 04, 2018
- Language: English
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3.67(5985 ratings)
National Book Award Finalist
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod, 26-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt–the “over-tall” 11-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town–walks into her library and changes her life.
Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless, they find their lives intertwined in ways neither one could have predicted. And as James grows – six-foot-five at age 12, then seven feet, then eight–so does Peggy’s heart and their most singular romance.
This production includes a bonus excerpt from Elizabeth McCracken’s next audiobook, Bowlaway.
... Read moreThe Hero of This Book
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Elizabeth McCracken
- Length: 4 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: October 04, 2022
- Language: English
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3.88(1693 ratings)
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall from: Los Angeles Times * Boston Globe * BookPage * Book Riot * The Millions * Publishers Weekly * LitHub * St. Louis Post Dispatch * Town & Country
A taut, groundbreaking new novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother–and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art
Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother’s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother’s life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.
The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary–her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties–and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother’s nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
... Read moreThe Souvenir Museum
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Kate Reading
- Length: 7 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: April 13, 2021
- Language: English
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3.49(1885 ratings)
A Most Anticipated Book From: OprahMag.com * Refinery 29 * Seattle Times * LitHub * Houston Chronicle * The Millions * Buzzfeed
Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date
In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children’s game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear.
With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires–for intimacy, atonement, comfort–bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed–and so do her readers. The Souvenir Museum showcases the talents of one of our finest contemporary writers as she tenderly takes the pulse of our collective and individual lives.
... Read moreThunderstruck
- By: Elizabeth McCracken
- Narrator: Erin Yuen
- Length: 6 hours 27 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: April 22, 2014
- Language: English
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3.93(2014 ratings)
From the author of the beloved novel The Giant’s House comes a beautiful new story collection. In ‘Property,’ a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish a rental house 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 in ‘Thunderstruck,’ 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.
... Read more