Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry [Hardcover]

Elizabeth McCracken (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1993

A collection of stories features quirky outcast characters--a circus performer, a tattoo artist's wife, and a Jewish woman from Iowa--and the author's own offbeat vision and unconventional wisdom. A first collection.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McCracken repeatedly creates characters who crave emotional shelter in this debut collection of nine stories. At times her oddball individuals seem contrived, as in the listless "Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware," narrated by a motherless girl whose father allows an ever-shifting cast of eccentrics to take up residence in his spacious, run-down home. Similarly, "What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children" features an armless woman--a former sideshow attraction--who welcomes a lonely friend from the circus into her family's suburban home. Sometimes though, such conscious attempts to blend perversity and sentimentality pay off: In "It's Bad Luck to Die," a woman marries a tattooist three decades her senior and shows her love by becoming a canvas for his most extravagant work. Another highlight is the wistful title tale, whose nomadic protagonist makes a life of being an uninvited, potentially unwanted guest by introducing herself to unwary families as their long-lost Aunt Helen Beck (hell and back?). Ultimately, Here's Your Hat is a melancholy book, filled with dispossessed, acquiescent characters incapable of forging permanent bonds with those who offer refuge.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

All the stories in this offbeat collection live up to the promise of their titles. "It's Bad Luck To Die" features a six-foot woman who comes to feel comfortable with herself only after she marries Tiny, a tattoo artist who uses her body as an immense empty canvas to be filled with his artistic creations. In "The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness," a middle-aged man lets his hair grow unfashionably long while he waits for his wife to emerge from a coma so she can cut it for him. In the title story, an older woman travels from relative to relative, having no home of her own, until one hospitable young couple learns the truth about her. Although McCracken has filled her stories with a cast of oddballs, she has created such compelling lives for them that she moves beyond our curiosity to gain our sympathy. These wonderful stories belong in most fiction collections.
- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 210 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (May 11, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679400265
• ISBN-13: 978-0679400264
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,439,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Star, October 15, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: Stories (Paperback)

McCracken is a writer destined to explode in popularity sometime soon. She's the real thing, a writer to the bone, with a voice that invades your sleep and characters who become more real than the people in your own house. At her best delineating the interior life of children and eccentrics, McCracken's stories have a timeless quality - you'd never mistake them as part of some ephemeral trend. She writes beautifully but invisibly, a rare talent these days. Every story in this collection is a polished gem, but "June" and "Here's Your Hat..." are signature pieces (and you'll not soon forget the latter's final line). I've given The Giant's House as a gift more than once and found it was passed on down the line, reader to reader, new fan to new fan. McCracken was one of Granta's picks for the best new young American writers. She shines above the majority of the other picks. Buy the book. Read the stories at breakfast and before bed. Then, when Oprah is singing her praises, you can say, "I knew about her way back when."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My new favorite author?, February 6, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: Stories (Paperback)

I picked this book up on a whim. I'd never heard of McCracken, but I liked the title. What a wonderful surprise!
I read a lot of short story collections, but I have to admit that I usually approach them with a sense of duty, not anticipation. (For me, reading short stories is like eating broccoli; I do it because I think I ought to, not because it's fun). But "Here's Your Hat.." is a joyous exception. THis collection is as readable and compelling as the best of novels.
McCracken's writing is beautiful --artistic but understated-- and her stories are like nothing else I've read. Funny and tragic at the same time. She has a taste for the bizarre; her characters range from the slightly odd to the downright freakish, but she somehow maintains complete believability. In general, I am turned off by "endearingly quirky" characters because they usually seem so contrived (think of that movie, "Benny and Joon" and you'll know what I mean). But McCracken is such a talented writer that she can make you feel a powerful affinity with even the most outlandish person.
I especially enjoyed "It's Bad Luck to Die", and the title story (both these pieces have final lines that will take your breath away) but all the stories in this book are excellent.
In short, if you don't read this collection, you're missing out. And if McCracken's two novels turn out to be as good as her short stories, I think I may have a new favorite author.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'll read any and every word this woman writes, May 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: Stories (Paperback)

I love Elizabeth McCracken. When I read this line in "Some Have Entertained Angels Unaware," I knew that I would follow its writer anywhere she wanted to take me: "Dad was thin then - maybe still is - and as chinless and gloomy as a clarinet." McCracken is a wonder, with characters, with language, and with the twisting roads of a story. I can feel only grateful that she is a writer and that we get to read what she puts on the page.