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Writing@Rice Cherry Reading Series: Elizabeth McCracken

Presented by Rice University - Cherry Reading Series at Brazos Bookstore

March 16, 2010

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Writing@Rice Cherry Reading Series presents Elizabeth McCracken, Tuesday, March 16, at 7pm at Brazos Bookstore.

The Rice Department of English and Fondren Library's Cherry Reading Series continues at your neighborhood bookstore with the fantastic Elizabeth McCracken. She is the author of The Giant's House, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN/Winship Award; and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry?, a collection of stories. Her most recent book is a memoir titled An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination about the loss of her first child in the ninth month of pregnancy, called by McCracken "the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending."

"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion." Lev Grossman

"'A child dies in this book: a baby,' Elizabeth McCracken tell us early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart." Mark Doty

"In An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all." Alice Sebold