Whether breathlessly enthusiastic, serenely calm, or really concentrating right now on their personal zombie issues, Elizabeth Craneβs happy cast explores the complexities behind personal satisfaction.
Elizabeth Crane is the author of two previous story collections, When the Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory. Her work has also been featured in numerous publications, including Chicago Reader and The Believer , as well as several anthologies, including McSweeneyβs Future Dictionary of America and The Best Underground Fiction. A winner of the Chicago Public Libraryβs 21st Century Award, Crane teaches creative writing at Northwesternβs School of Continuing Studies, The School of the Art Institute, and The University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.
From Publishers Weekly
The two most successful stories of Crane's third collection (following All This Heavenly Glory) are also the most intimate: The Most Everything in the World listens in on a husband and wife playing the what-would-you-take-to-a-deserted-island game, while Donovan's Closet, about a girl with a fetish involving her boyfriend's lemon-scented closet, turns into an optimistic tale of a seemingly doomed relationship's survival. Other characters in Crane's lineup include a suburban zombie turned reality TV star (Betty the Zombie), a time-traveling photographer who gets arrested for being happy (the title story) and a handful of other victims and survivors of not-so-everyday life. Because of Crane's repetitive narration the book is best read piecemeal rather than straight through: I don't mean literally everything. Literally most things, but not everything. In Promise, a story about a woman waiting for the arrival of her adopted child, which closes the collection, Crane quips, I will feed you sugar. And that might as well be Crane's promise for the collection as a whole.
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From Booklist
A woman experiences either a spiritual transformation in her new loverβs closet or the onset of a weird new addiction. A time-traveling photographer is jailed for being happy. The citizens in Clearview wake up one morning and discover that everything has become transparent. A woman gets bitten in a fabric store, turns into a zombie, and seeks help on a reality TV show. Welcome to Craneβs loony universe, which actually is not much stranger than the world etched so crisply in βVarieties of Loudness in Chicago,β a droll tale about a fashionista in a new condo obsessed with her unhip neighbors, a family living in an old house with a big garden. In her third collection of inventive short stories, Crane continues to ingeniously satirize our muddled quest for meaning in all the wrong places. Her canny pivots from realistic trivia to outer-limits bizarreness, caustic humor, and underlying belief in goodness make for magnetizing, pleasingly barbed tales of the ever-shifting zeitgeist and the unchanging nature of the human heart. --Donna Seaman