Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books: Heres Your Hat Whats Your Hurry (stories), the novels The Giants House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and the forthcoming Thunderstruck & Other Stories. Shes received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
She has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University, the University of Oregon, the University of Houston, and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin, and boy are her arms tired.
The Slip (2025) Lucas Schaefer "How can a book be uproarious and thought provoking, devil-may-care and philosophical, as full of life in all its ugliness and beauty and strangeness as Lucas Schaefer's The Slip? Complicated and comic, this is a novel about what it means to long to be otherwise, with a mystery at its heart, as well as love and ruthlessness and the kind of crazy imagination missing lately from American fiction. You may not be ready for it, but this is a book which will grab you by the lapels, the throat, the heart, the hand: everywhere."
Felony Juggler (2025) Penn Jillette "Penn Jillette's tremendous new novel is about juggling. Not just literal juggling-though it is the great American juggling novel-but on every metaphoric level too: moral, sexual, biographical, linguistic. Felony Juggler is deep and hilarious, raunchy, breakneck, entertaining, and thoughtful-everything you'd expect from Penn Jillette."
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (2025) Colwill Brown "Colwill Brown is, simply, brilliant and original on every level; I haven't read a first book that floored me so thoroughly since Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is astonishing, as hilarious and wrenching as life itself. Her characters and sentences knock around my brain still, moving, unsettling, indelible. She is a writer like nobody else."
The World After Alice (2024) Lauren Aliza Green "Lauren Aliza Green's The World After Alice is a bouquet of a book: thoughtful, heartfelt, funny, tender, tough, and gorgeously written. It is a novel about how love won't save you, except in the ways that it does, about the pain of family life, and also its transcendent qualities. Green is a tremendous new writer."
Housemates (2024) Emma Copley Eisenberg "Gorgeous . . . A novel as full as life itself, about art-making and love and friendship and making a way in the world, complicated, funny, questioning, moral."
Plastic (2024) Scott Guild "I don't know how to describe Scott Guild's Plastic, a stunningly brilliant novel, other than to say it is profound, hilarious, wrenching, bizarre, about an imaginary universe with incalculable complexities that is also somehow our own broken world. It's one of those books that will follow you around, into your dreams and your daily life. You have never read anything like it. Scott Guild is an endlessly inventive and deeply exciting writer, morbid and funny and strange and humane."
This is Salvaged (2023) Vauhini Vara "The stories in Vauhini Vara's This Is Salvaged are brilliant, entirely human, abidingly strange. She is one of our most inventive writers of fiction, as well as visionary, with a gift for writing about grief both extraordinary and ordinary. This Is Salvaged is unforgettable."
Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare (2023) Megan Kamalei Kakimoto "In Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare, the enormously talented Megan Kakimoto gives us her Hawai'i, as bright as blood, as dark as blood. It's a book about beauty and brutality, love and threat, home and estrangement, as original and fearless a book as I've read in years. It does not pull its punches; it's altogether a knockout. Eleven knockouts, one KO for every story."
The Great Reclamation (2023) Rachel Heng "The Great Reclamation is so beautifully written and perfectly imagined that you follow its characters out to sea, through city streets, into the corners of villages, through every strange quirk of life, until they get under your skin and into your dreams. How does Rachel Heng write about the imaginary and the historical in a way that they are both equally believable and moving and strange? I don't know how she does, it but this book is a marvel."
The Bandit Queens (2023) Parini Shroff "Parini Shroff's splendid The Bandit Queens is a hilarious romp about serious things--as serious as a novel gets, and as funny, too, with characters who are dear and maddening and indelible and gorgeously drawn. Twisty, compulsive, bold, surprising, moving: It's a wonderful book."
The Sun Walks Down (2022) Fiona McFarlane "The Sun Walks Down is a brilliant, intimate epic, a book about a family and also about history that is full of heart and heat. Fiona McFarlane's ear for the gurgles and clamor and hidden symphonies of her characters' souls is flawless; the way their lives intertwine is propulsive, heartbreaking. She is, simply, one of the best writers around."
Fellowship Point (2022) Alice Elliott Dark "I fell into Fellowship Point--fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery."
The Caretakers (2022) Amanda Bestor-Siegal "How rare this is, a book - a first book - that has it all. The Caretakers is thrilling and deeply moving, gorgeously written and intricately plotted, morally complex and surprising and sweeping and intimate, with some of the most indelible and heart-breaking characters I have ever encountered in a novel. It's a bold and brilliant book."
Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (2022) Sindya Bhanoo "What a beautiful book Seeking Fortune Elsewhere is - stories about home, love, heartache, and betrayal, about the moral complexity of human love in all its varieties. Sindya Bhanoo describes her characters with an astonishing mixture of mercy and mercilessness, which is to say they live and breathe and will break your heart and stun you. Indeed, the whole book is stunning, and the good news is it's only her first."
The Family Chao (2022) Lan Samantha Chang "The Family Chao is riveting, delicious, full of love and danger, an intricate look at the so-called American Dream and one small-town American family trying and failing to save itself. Lan Samantha Chang's characters are unforgettable: dear, maddening, funny, cruel. The Family Chao is an up-to-the-minute look at what it means to be accused and visible in America, and also an old-fashioned page-turner. A book to stay up late reading, and then to dream about."
The Perfume Thief (2021) Timothy Schaffert "The Perfume Thief is an exceptional novel told in an extraordinary voice, a book about finding beauty at the most difficult times: in the walls of your room, inside your closets, and in those you love. It's also a hell of a yarn. What more could you want?"
The Sweetness of Water (2021) Nathan Harris "Nathan Harris is, plainly, one of the most exciting new writers I've read in years. He has a profound understanding of the human soul---and of the vast variety of human souls on the earth---and writes sentences of immense beauty and strangeness. His work is funny and wrenching, brilliant and exact. The Sweetness of Water is an extraordinary book, and just the start of an extraordinary career."
The Heavens (2019) Sandra Newman "Reading Sandra Newman's The Heavens is like falling up a brilliant flight of stairs. Inventive and moving and surprising on every level, it's a novel that doesn't just play with time and history and certainty: it turns those things inside out. I've been haunted by its characters and ideas ever since I reluctantly finished it."
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