You Must Be This Happy to Enter
Stories
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Crane seems to be carving out a younger, brassier, less dystopic territory to complement the fiction of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace." —The Quarterly Conversation
In her third short story collection, following When the Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory, Elizabeth Crane presents a quirky cast of characters all searching for, showing off, or seriously questioning what makes them happy. There's a woman who speaks in all exclamation points, one enamored by her boyfriend's closet, a zombie reality TV star, a mother whose baby turns into Ethan Hawke, and a woman whose moods are printed on her forehead.
Whether breathlessly enthusiastic, serenely calm, or really concentrating right now on their issues, Elizabeth Crane's characters shine a spotlight on our spirituality-starved, self-improvement-seeking, celebrity-obsessed culture.
"In her third collection of inventive short stories, Crane continues to ingeniously satirize our muddled quest for meaning in all the wrong places." —Booklist
"A well-crafted collection of short stories, one whose clarity of tone and theme unites each and every piece into a cohesive whole. At a time when it seems almost antediluvian to be optimistic, Crane's sincerity stands as a bewitching reminder that there is more to literature than tragedy." —Bookslut
"Zombies, time travelers, reality TV contestants and even a few normalish folks populate the pages of Elizabeth Crane's quirky, charming new collection." —PopMatters
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.
