The Souvenir Museum: Stories
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE STORY PRIZE
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.
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Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books, including The Souvenir Museum (long-listed for the National Book Award), Bowlaway, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award), and The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist). Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. 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.
"The master stylist and author of Bowlaway rolls another strike with this magnificent array of idiosyncratic love stories."--Oprah Daily
"There's good reason a new Elizabeth McCracken book is cause for celebration: everything she writes--her short stories, her novels, and, hey, also a memoir--is consistently brilliant. Her work is the perfect amount of odd, witty, tender, and deceptively heart-splitting. I can't wait."--The Millions
"Elizabeth McCracken is a national treasure."--Paul Harding, The Wall Street Journal
"Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favorite writers. . . . She writes with acuity, soul, and a kind of easy grace that probably kills her, about characters she has created to love. . . . Anything new by her is an excuse for wild, drunken celebration."--Nick Hornby, The Believer
"The 12 stories collected in Elizabeth McCracken's The Souvenir Museum are skillfully crafted miniatures that feature unfailingly ordinary characters whose lives she uses to illuminate truths about love, longing and the elusive search for connection...The personal discoveries unearthed by characters like these may seem inconsequential, but they are anything but that. They're the stories of choices, turning points and epiphanies that are the stuff of life itself, and of indelible moments Elizabeth McCracken preserves in these unpretentious tales...In a dozen stories, Elizabeth McCracken excels at capturing the kinds of moments that often escape our notice." --Shelf Awareness
"[McCracken] writes from pain and makes something beautiful from it, and, because she is a writer of remarkable sensitivity and has such a light touch, because so much love is in the observation, something wonderful happens, a kind of transcendence. The mundane becomes profound, and, against all odds, the reader is left feeling uplifted." --Carol Birch, The Guardian
[McCracken] never promises us freedom from pain, but she always offers just enough heart to endure it. . . . 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. She never misses the infamous 7-10 split, managing to hit Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler with the same ball.--Ron Charles, Washington Post
Always...shining through the carefully, beautifully painted grays, is the clarity of McCracken's humor, bright and invigorating, like flickers of sunlight. Humor illuminates her work, revealing things clearly that we might have overlooked. McCracken refuses to distinguish between the absurdity of comedy and the absurdity of tragedy.--Cathleen Schine, New York Times Book Review
"McCracken knows all kinds of subtle, enticing secrets of the heart and conveys them in silky, transparent language." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Elizabeth McCracken is a master of the short story and each of the stories in this gem of a collection shows a different facet of the human experience, shining all the brighter for having had McCracken's attention paid to it for a little while."--Refinery 29
"McCracken . . . proves her mastery of short fiction with these 12 tightly structured, searingly realistic stories. . . . Enduring love--along with the urge to resist it--is this volume's common theme, whether in relationships between parents and children, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and even in-laws. . . . An astonishingly powerful collection worth multiple readings."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Wry, emotionally complex family stories. . . . McCracken is a tremendously sharp, soulful, and witty writer, rightfully considered one of finest American short story practitioners at work today."--Literary Hub
"[A]n assured collection... McCracken opens up worlds in a mere sentence, and every page is illuminated with nuanced observations of human behavior."--Booklist
