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    Thunderstruck: & Other Stories
    Unavailable
    Thunderstruck: & Other Stories
    Unavailable
    Thunderstruck: & Other Stories
    Audiobook6 hours

    Thunderstruck: & Other Stories

    Written by Elizabeth McCracken

    Narrated by Erin Yuen

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the author of the beloved novel The Giant’s House comes a beautiful new story collection. In “Property,” a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish a rental house by removing his landlord’s possessions. In “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,” the household of a successful filmmaker is visited years later by his famous first subject, whose trust he betrayed. In “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston,” the manager of a grocery store becomes fixated on the famous case of a missing local woman. And in “Thunderstruck,” a family makes a quixotic decision to flee to Paris for a summer, only to find their lives altered in an unimaginable way by their teenage daughter’s risky behavior.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateApr 22, 2014
    ISBN9781629235332
    Unavailable
    Thunderstruck: & Other Stories
    Author

    Elizabeth McCracken

    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.

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    Reviews for Thunderstruck

    4.5/5

    72 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A deft return to short stories from one of my favorites. McCracken's surprising and perfect metaphors stud sure-footed paragraphs. Though generally darker and occasionally less resolved than her previous work, the effect here is the small thrill that things may end badly or abruptly for any of the characters.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic. I came across one of Elizabeth McCracken's stories in the latest Best American Short Stories collection and it was so good I jotted down her name so I could find more of her work to read. I do this a lot; it's why I read anthologies like the Best American series. Sometimes the story in the anthology turns out to be the author's best, but not with McCracken - every story in Thunderstruck is brilliant. Beautifully written, unique and satisfying.It's like Christmas when you discover a new author that this good.
    • 5/5
      For whatever reason, I'm not usually a fan of short stories. I don't know why...I WANT to like them, I do...but they usually leave me wanting so much more. But this collection is different. Each story was complete enough to satisfy my interest in the characters. The writing is exquisite. I own all of her books in hardcover, and this particular one is a signed copy.
    • 4/5
      These stories are tragically luminous. Or luminously tragic. Either way they're sad and haunting, shot through with moments of humour and pathos, but overwhelmingly, achingly, sad. They're about loss, tragedy, grief and mourning and how events can rip us out of our lives and leave us unable to re-find the tracks we thought we were on. The title story is the standout, but it's a consistently excellent collection.
    • 5/5
      For whatever reason, I'm not usually a fan of short stories. I don't know why...I WANT to like them, I do...but they usually leave me wanting so much more. But this collection is different. Each story was complete enough to satisfy my interest in the characters. The writing is exquisite. I own all of her books in hardcover, and this particular one is a signed copy.
    • 4/5
      This collection of short stories has the common theme of people transitioning to different modes of being or levels of consciousness. Some characters are dead, some are missing, more than a few are dying, and some are in comas. It could be a very depressing collection, but McCracken's language has an element of beauty and hopefulness that takes the edge off the dark elements of her stories.
    • 5/5
      Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken is a very highly recommended collection of nine short stories. Oh my goodness - read this exquisitely crafted collection!

      McCracken’s short stories in this collection include:
      Something Amazing - one mother grieves the loss of her daughter years before while another has two delinquent sons
      Property - a man moves into a rented house thinking it was furnished with the owner's discarded possessions.
      Some Terpsichore - an abusive former lover is recalled with nostalgia and pain.
      Juliet - librarians react to the murder of one of their patrons
      The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs - a man learns his son has broken his trust
      Hungry - a woman cares for her granddaughter while her son lies in the hospital
      The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston - deals with how a memory can be viewed differently by different people
      Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey - a dying man visits a former friend
      Thunderstruck - a father and mother struggle to be good parents for their daughter only to then have to deal with the brain injury resulting from her actions

      All of the stories feature a slightly oblique point-of-view, as if the normal world is just ever-so-subtly tilted but enough to change perceptions into a reality that seems far removed from the ordinary. McCracken's extraordinary writing ability helps propel the stories forward even as they seem off kilter with life's ironies. She manages to capture despair, tenderness, outrage, and hopefulness, with her keen insight into human behavior and emotions. Everyone is coping with something with various degrees of success, while memory plays tricks on more than one character in this volume.

      Some of these short stories were previously published in Granta, Ploughshares, Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Stories.


      Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Random House for review purposes.
    • 5/5
      Simply an exquisite collection of short stories. I loved it!
    • 4/5
      Nine pretty bleak and sad stories here. Missing children, dead children, injured children. A woman who sings like a man playing a saw. A son who sells his parents' house right from under them. ARGH. But the last story - the one that names the book - is Paris sad with lovely father-daughter overtones. Can't say I really enjoyed it, though the writing is impeccable.
    • 5/5
      So, so good. The last story got me right in the heart for personal reasons, but I would have loved it anyway. Review on LF to follow one of these days.
    • 4/5
      There are a few things I ask myself after reading a book of short stories: are they complete in and of themselves and will I remember any of them? In this book I have to say, yes. Brilliantly constructed with memorable characters and plots, there were none that I actively disliked.I found the first story, "Something Amazing", haunting. "Property" is an amazing story about the many different ways we grieve. "Juliet" is set in a library, which is where I work and so many of the comments were very identifiable, a strange murder and the death of a rabbit, make this one I will remember. It is the title story that had the biggest impact on me as a mother, a horrible accident, the victim a daughter and a mother and a father who differ on how viable her future will be.All these stories are about ordinary people confronting a tragedy and the ways they react to this. This collection has a common and relatable theme and it is a theme that we all face at one time or another.
    • 4/5
      This short collection (around 150 pages) has been a rewarding read. It’s the first book I’ve read by Elizabeth McCracken, but I’ve enjoyed these bittersweet nine stories so much that I plan to read one of her novels soon. Although most of the stories are about death or tragedy, about sad, lonely people, and you feel sorry and empathize with the characters, they are not maudlin nor bleak, quite the opposite, there are plenty of funny and absurd moments when you feel forced to smile. There’s not a weak story in the book, and the prose and the plot is powerful in all of them, but I’d like to highlight my favorites ones: “Juliet”, “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston” and “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey”. And most of all, the unforgettable, brilliant and heartbreaking “Thunderstruck”, one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommended for anyone. A must-read for any short fiction fan.
    • 5/5
      I was one of the lucky winners to get this as a Goodreads Giveaway. This is a wonderful collection. McCracken is a master storyteller with razor-sharp sentences. These stories are all devastating--murder, missing persons, dead or dying loved ones, injured children, grief, mourning, loss--but McCracken's unsentimental sense of humor combined with with an all-encompassing empathy for all of her characters, whether admirable or self-centered, lift these stories above what might sound from their descriptions like dreary plots. There's not a bad story in the book, but my favorites are "Property," "The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston," and the title story. But then after saying that, I want to add "Hungry," "Something Amazing, "Some Terpsichore," and "Juliet." I could quote numerous sentences from these stories that made me gasp or laugh out loud, but to do so would spoil the adventure of encountering them for yourself.

      These stories put their characters and readers through the ringer with their sudden jolts of perspective and insight, with their depth of feeling. No easy answers or tidy endings here. And that's as it should be.