"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,...

A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child. This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind...

A short story by Elizabeth McCracken from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre. In 'Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark', a family trip to a Texan waterpark prompts a life-changing decision. Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontë's game-changing...

An unusual love story about a little librarian on Cape Cod and the tallest boy in the world, The Giant's House is the magical first novel from the author of the 1994 ALA Notable collection Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry. 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...

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

One of the first great novels of the Romantic era, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame has thrilled generations of readers with its powerfully melodramatic story of Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback who lives in the bell tower of medieval Paris's most famous cathedral. Feared and hated by all, Quasimodo is looked after by Dom Claude Frollo, a stern, cold priest who ignores the poor hunchback in the face of his frequent public torture. But someone...