This Thing called Life in Elizabeth McCracken’s “The Souvenir Museum”
In McCracken’s dramatic and often humorous stories you’ll find a goluptious coterie of eccentric and fascinating, if not entirely likable, characters whose stories unfold in a steady stream of exquisite writing. Evocative and often droll turns of phrase concoct mental images of shoes that are “damp as oysters,” voices brew like “hot cider,” flesh can be “so fair-skinned as to be combustible,” and the “hatred of castoffery came upon her like an allergy.” Inanimate objects come to life, too. A hotel named “The Narcissus” sits “on the edge of a lake and admired its own reflection” and skies are as “mild as a milk-glass rabbit.”
You can read my review of Elizabeth McCracken’s The Souvenir Museum in The Boston Globe by clicking the image below.
You can buy Elizabeth McCracken’s story collection, The Souvenir Museum at Barnes & Noble.