Elizabeth McCracken

"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 narrator, a writer, recalls all that...

By turns graceful and knowing, funny and moving, Niagara Falls All Over Again is the latest masterwork by National Book Award finalist and author of The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken.
Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it,...

"The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. 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 forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined...

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...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

Featuring guest editor contributions by the author of "Less," the latest edition of the respected literary annual collects twenty top-selected short stories from the previous year.

A collection of captivating and thought-provoking photographs by award-winning photographer Melissa Ann Pinney that contemplate the essence of duality in our relationships and in the world that surrounds us. Pinney, whose work is in the permanent collections of dozens of American museums, including the Metropolitan, MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty, aims her lens at pairs--mostly, but not always human--that display or imply elusive...

Legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, Paul Ingram has found what he feared was long lost --His collection of humorous, intelligent, rollicking, and witty clerihews. The clerihew collection will be a big hit with readers (adult) of all sorts: fans of poetry, of humor, the literary arts, political cartoons, as well as readers of history and current affairs.

"Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written in 1831, at a time when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was falling into disrepair. This epic novel helped spark a preservationist movement that led to the cathedral being restored to its full glory. Set in 1482, the story tells of how four men-the hunchbacked bell-ringer, Quasimodo; the archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo; the dashing soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers; and the poet Pierre...