An illustration of a person reading in a blue setting full of people

Short-Books-for-Busy-People_Hero-Desktop_Penguin

Reading lists

Short books to read when you’re overwhelmed

The Souvenir Museum

McCracken has a real talent for exploring what makes an individual unusual when they are entwined with another person, and her stories are sparkling gems of human eccentricity.

[McCracken] has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured... Her prose is stippled with just-so observations.

[A] sly, emotionally complex collection . . . Each story opens to reveal a whole life spent within the web of a family, chosen or not. Full of gems, this collection is a winner.

McCracken is a totally assured performer: even seemingly throwaway perceptions are often memorably poetic, and there is a hint of melancholy under the comedy.

It's pitch perfect; funny, melancholy and alight with the kind of sharp observations that reveal the fault lines in relationships and family dynamics... McCracken cracks open the hearts of her captivating characters.

McCracken...has a gift for startlingly original turns of phrase and piercing observational writing. Her 12 stories are varied and imaginative, sparkling tales of human eccentricity.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag­ination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award). She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic­tion at the University of Texas at Austin.

'One of my favourite writers' Nick Hornby 
 
One of the most acclaimed writers of our day, 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. 
 
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. And on a trip to a water park with their son, two fathers each confront a deep-rooted personal fear. With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken shows how the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. 
 
'McCracken has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured... Her prose is stippled with just-so observations' Observer 
 
'McCracken is a totally assured performer: even seemingly throwaway perceptions are often memorably poetic, and there is a hint of melancholy under the comedy' Sunday Times 
 
'This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders... McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives' New Yorker

Bowlaway

A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s House

McCracken is a firecracker stylist and every sentence, every image, is crafted for physical impact… It is exuberant, a bit bonkers and raw and unflinching. It will find a great many fans – and no doubt some awards, too.

A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga… is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith.

McCracken’s rambunctious saga [Bowlaway]… is a funhouse of a novel. Even the most incidental of characters are granted glorious vignettes… in [an] unpredictable and startling world.

[McCracken has] considerable gifts as a novelist [and] instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling... This novel’s cast grows epic, but McCracken is always most impressive when she works small, when she is describing movie kisses or corsets or simply loneliness and longing.

Death and life, frosted with macabre comedy: it’s why we’ve enjoyed Elizabeth McCracken since her debut novel, The Giant’s House… nothing is ordinary in this story… There’s a wickedness to McCracken’s technique, the way she lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us… endlessly surprising.

Bowlaway is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss... McCracken’s gloriously vibrant and boisterously surprising narrative voice is one of the great triumphs of Bowlaway... A tour de force.

Wildly entertaining... [A] wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley... Bowlaway celebrates the oddest of oddballs and the freakiest of freak accidents with wit and heart. To read McCracken’s inimitably clever sentences and follow her quirky narrative twists is to be constantly delighted.

Irresistibly quirky… Packed with Dickensian characters and plot devices (orphans, secret wills, hidden treasure…), [Bowlaway is] lyrical and humorous, with some dazzlingly inventive twists. A family saga unlike any other.

McCracken’s imaginative reserves and her delight in outlandish events make [Bowlaway]… a kind of fable – a colourful and often captivating fantasia on New England themes.

McCracken’s newest novel, a 20th-century family epic centered on candlepin bowling, is populated by strange, excellent characters, and unfolds with all the offbeat coziness and heartache of a great American fable: molasses floods, workplace fires, surprising heirs, and all.

McCracken’s book is a little McCrackers – a woman falls from the sky, lands in a graveyard and survives to open a bowling alley… there’s a strong American Gothic, magical realism feel… But who is she really? Or any of us, come to that? As we follow Bertha and her family down the generations, the answer seems to be that people are strange, life is random and what matters is love.

At the turn of the 20th century a woman is discovered unconscious and nearly frozen in a New England cemetery with only a bowling ball, a candlepin, and 15 pounds of gold on her. The National Book Award finalist’s exuberantly weird and wonderful book unravels the mystery.

Bowlaway snatches up every individual that finds joy or tragedy in proximity to the bowling alley and allows them to be observed tenderly and precisely... McCracken’s love of language is the catching kind... In Bowlaway, the journey through McCracken’s lush, piercing prose is the destination.

Reading Elizabeth McCracken—the gorgeously-put-together sentences parading the pages like models on a Paris runway; the crazy, original insights; the definitive, wholly fictional pronouncements—is like going on an automotive safari... I could not stop reading.

McCracken’s delightful prose and rich historical details make this the perfect book to get lost in.

Passionate and comically self-aware romanticizing of candlepin bowling itself… genius… McCracken’s… delightful voice and poetic facility have been present since her debut novel… Bowlaway…[is] a towering, hearty, multi-tiered cake, dazzling and confident in its construction.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag&shy;ination, and Thunderstruck &amp; Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award). She has received grants and fellow&shy;ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic&shy;tion at the University of Texas at Austin.

‘A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga…is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith’ 
Marie Claire 
 
Read the sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s House 
 
Bertha is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts – ever since she was discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery with nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person. She has no past to speak of, and her mysterious origin scandalises the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. 
 
But Bertha is plucky and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark. As she changes the town forever, her singular spirit resonating through every board and brick and bone, an epic family saga unfolds, set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America.

The Giant's House

The Giant's House is a modern classic - a firm in-house favourite at Vintage - reissued to coincide with Elizabeth McCracken's new novel, Bowlaway

The most original and enchanting romance I have read in a long time

McCracken avoids the temptations of easy humour and writes with great pathos and delicacy about the complexities of love

The lucid, compelling prose convinces us that this mismatched pair do become a real couple: improbably, disturbingly, and very movingly, theirs is a true love story

The Giant's House is the work of a writer who is as singular and astute as the characters she creates... funny, ambitious and precise... a beautifully composed portrait of people struggling against themselves with the full force of their courage and desire

Every so often a novel comes along which transcends whimsy with the beauty of its writing. Elizabeth McCracken's small masterpiece is one of these

I guarantee that this novel will touch your heart, just as it did mine

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books. She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic­tion at the University of Texas at Austin.

‘Every so often a novel comes along which transcends whimsy with the beauty of its writing. Elizabeth McCracken's small masterpiece is one of these' Guardian 
 
A powerful and unique story about connection, showing that miracles can happen – even across a library circulation desk. 
 
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-eight year old librarian Peggy Cort feels as if love and life have stood her up. That is, until the day James Carlson Sweatt – the 'over-tall' eleven year old boy who's the talk of the town – walks into her library and changes her life for ever. 
 
Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows – six foot five at age twelve, then seven foot, then eight – so does their most singular romance. 
 
 *Perfect for readers who loved Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine*

Thunderstruck & Other Stories

A brilliant new collection of short fiction from the National Book Award finalist and author of The Giant’s House.

These nine stories are filled with longing, guilt and violence.

Jewelled and barbed with the beauty and brutality of real life, these are sentences of perfect weight and understanding. There are no fillers here, no stories that disappoint: the nine coalesce into something rare and understatedly breathtaking. Like the missing who haunt these stories, Thunderstruck is unforgettable.

An electric blend of hilarity and despair.

McCracken writes in lilting, contained prose, and imbues her narratives with wry humour and the soothing resonance of fairy tales… An unforgettable collection that should be irredeemably sad but, in fact, is strangely life-affirming.

I was so enthralled by her world, I didn’t want to leave

Please do yourself a favour and secure a copy of this splendid book. And not because it is the winner of the Story Prize, but because is exceptionally good

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag­ination, and Thunderstruck &amp; Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award). She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic­tion at the University of Texas at Austin.

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 humour, empathy, and rare and magical descriptive powers these nine vibrant stories navigate the fragile space between love and loneliness. In 'Property', 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. 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 behaviour. 
 
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 &amp; Other Stories shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

A grief memoir that fuses the immediacy readers crave from the genre with all the reflective, consoling depth of fiction.

'This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.' 
 
A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, Elizabeth McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. Then she fell in love, got married, and continued her life of writing, travelling, and teaching with her husband.Two years ago, she found herself in a remote part of France, waiting for the birth of her first child. 
 
This book is about what happens next. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, a baby is lost.Just over a year later, a baby is born. In a profoundly moving display of humour, heart, and unfailing generosity, McCracken tenderly presents her story: a story of true love and unfathomable sadness, of courageous recovery and bittersweet moments, of steadfast memories and deep affection.Grief walks through these pages of this remarkable book, but so do happiness and hope.

How to Write Fiction

A Long Game

Elizabeth McCracken was my teacher, and it’s a joy to know that now more people will have access to her brilliance through A Long Game… A guidebook for any fiction writer, and a problem-solving and cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business

Elizabeth McCracken is that rarest of combinations – a world class writer and a world class writing teacher. With A Long Game she has distilled the electric, inspiring genius, enthusiasm, and wit that she has brought to the classroom for more than three decades and put it into a book that's practically a masters program in itself

Elizabeth McCracken, one of the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane writers you will ever encounter, has written one the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane books about writing you will ever read. Have a pen ready. You'll want to underline sentences on every page that make you stop and think or inwardly cheer or nod in recognition. Most importantly, you'll want to run to your desk and write. A Long Game is an absolute gift

On the one hand, as a superfan of Elizabeth McCracken, I am cranky that others will benefit from her wisdom. On the other hand, any excuse to spend time with McCracken’s intelligent and unpretentious voice is a gift. This is not just an indispensable craft book but a writer's argument with herself about what, in fact, constitutes craft

A deeply practical book that is also beautifully written, that is also somehow a page turner. It is, like McCracken’s fiction, a crystalline distillation of her warm, funny and no-nonsense voice. When I finished reading it, I couldn’t decide if what I wanted to do immediately was write fiction or just turn back to page one and read it again

A Long Game is the most generous, idiosyncratic, useful, and companionable book on writing I’ve ever read. It’s basically a portable Elizabeth McCracken. How did we get so lucky?

Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag­ination, Thunderstruck &amp; Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award), The Souvenir Museum and The Hero of This Book. She has received grants and fellow­ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.

Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal companion to every writing life 
 
'Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers' Garth Greenwell 
 
Write every day 
Show, don’t tell 
Write what you know 
Kill Your Darlings 
 
These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true. They are all pieces of writing advice that Elizabeth McCracken expertly and persuasively shoots down in A Long Game. 
 
McCracken has been writing for most of her life. For over thirty-five years, she has also taught creative writing to generations of students, including at Iowa, guiding many writers towards their own answers to the question of how to write fiction. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, deconstructing received wisdom whilst playfully tackling the mysteries that are inherent to writing and creativity. 
 
This book will lead any writer, at any stage of their career, back to the page. As much a book about the life of a working artist as it is a guide to thinking about fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource, and the ideal companion to every writing life. 
 
‘Elizabeth McCracken was my teacher, and it’s a joy to know that now more people will have access to her brilliance through A Long Game… A guidebook for any fiction writer, and a problem-solving and cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business’ Yiyun Li

Elizabeth McCracken

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Easily one of the best novels (or is it actually a memoir?) that will be published this year... It is touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you.

A more loving and moving tribute to its subject is hard to imagine.

Her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down... With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.

This story is a tribute to how great writing can elevate any subject.

McCracken is such a witty writer, full of sharp observations about life, writing, relationships and the people she meets.

How reassuring it is to have writers like Elizabeth McCracken among us... One of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness... Her speciality is the interior, and the interior is vast. We must bring our own compasses, emotional and aesthetic.

Teases out her McCracken's strengths: a domestic tale about family life in all its weirdness and warmth.

Light of touch, witty... Raises all kinds of chewy questions about truth, fiction and where to draw the boundaries of the imagination, both in life and prose... Deeply moving.

An accounting of the self that refuses autobiography, a travelogue about being lost, a novel that is really a theory of fiction, an elegy that sidesteps solemnity: The Hero of This Book brilliantly disarms our usual modes of thinking. Elizabeth McCracken is one of America's finest writers, fascinating, inventive, and profound.

McCracken's novels awe me endlessly. I read this wondering how she was managing to make me laugh and cry at the same time.

A life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday.

This slender book is a powerful tribute to its author's 'hero': her clever, undaunted mother.

I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood, achingly precise on memory and grief, and suffused with warmth and love.

Wonderful... Through The Hero of This Book, McCracken extends her mother's heaven to our memories. I'll be thinking about her with great affection for a very long time.

Pure entertainment of the happiest and saddest kind, as artful a tribute to a deceased parent as was Philip Roth&rsquo;s masterful Patrimony.

Ingenious&hellip; [a] firecracker of a story, The Hero of This Book, is told with wry observation, empathy and an abundance of love for her eccentric Jewish mother.

Touching and funny, and full of sharp-eyed observations about family life and parents and how your childhood forms you. By the end, you feel real affection for the narrator&rsquo;s (at times confounding) mother.

A short, taut, restlessly shape-shifting novel.

&lsquo;A sublime gift&rsquo; MEG MASON 
 
From the bestselling author, a taut, heartrending new novel about a writer&rsquo;s relationship with her larger-than-life mother. 
 
Ten months after her mother&rsquo;s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother&rsquo;s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself recalling all that made her complicated mother extraordinary. Even though the woman, a writer, wants to respect her mother&rsquo;s nearly pathological sense of privacy, she must decide whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal. 
 
* A New Yorker, Time, Washington Post, Oprah Daily and NPR Book of the Year * 
 
&lsquo;I absolutely loved it. A moving portrayal of daughterhood&hellip;suffused with warmth and love&rsquo; 
MEGAN HUNTER 
 
&lsquo;Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life&hellip; wonderful&rsquo; 
GUARDIAN 
 
&lsquo;Tender, funny, heartbreaking&hellip; a writer who always delights&rsquo; 
RUMAAN ALAM

Elizabeth McCracken

Praise for The Hero of this Book

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Into a single, most singular novel, McCracken fits everything we adult daughters know and feel and love and fear about our beautiful, complicated mothers, and could never say. A sublime gift.

What could be better value than a book set over one day that you can read in one day, but that will stay in your heart and refuse to go... One of the greatest memoirs of a parent.

Confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity.

Books by Elizabeth McCracken

Articles featuring Elizabeth McCracken

Short books to read when you’re overwhelmed

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter