elizabeth crane

Paperback hits stores June 3rd!

From Entertainment Weekly Grade: A
Elizabeth Crane's linked collection of stories chronicles Charlotte Anne Byers, who begins life as a precocious ''opera star'' (at 8 she's cast as Urchin No. 2 in La Bohéme), yet winds up wondering why her life didn't quite pan out. “All This Heavenly Glory” is dizzy-making in its long, galloping sentences (replete with parenthetical phrases so wickedly astute, you need to reread them several times, which turns you around so that you need to read the entire sentence again) and tragic, hilarious, spot-on observations about, say, recovering from being dumped by someone you dated exactly once. Crane has written that excruciatingly great book that begs you to inhale it in one sitting while at the same time trying to savor every knockout sentence.

-Karen Karbo

Elizabeth Crane’s fabulous novel-in-stories, All This Heavenly Glory (Little, Brown, 2005) reminded me of some of my favorite writers and their books: Laurie Colwin’s The Lone Pilgrim, Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open?, and Lydia Davis’s Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. She has a similar quirky sense of humor and the ability to wrest the unusual out of the quotidian (and even the hackneyed). But the voice in Crane’s stories is all her own, and I grew to adore the main character, Charlotte Anne Byers, whose experiences we follow from age 6 (arriving in New York with a newly divorced mother) up to age 40 (falling in love with a much younger man). I felt as though I were sitting next to a really interesting person who goes on to tell you the story of her unremarkable but fascinating – because of the way she tells it – life.

-Nancy Pearl, author of Booklust

From The Providence Journal
Reading Elizabeth Crane's wild, elliptical prose is like listening to a manic, stand-up comic who compulsively narrates a barrage of self-reflective commentary about memories that pop up as free-associative brain synapses collide and link childhood wonders to dating debacles to parents' new lives to the ways the mind catalogs experience and the heart stumbles along trying to catch up. Like that. If you enjoyed Crane's addictive prose in When the Messenger Is Hot, then you'll love In All This Heavenly Glory. In Glory, we are introduced to Charlotte Anne Byers as she writes a personal ad as one long, run-on sentence, cataloguing all the ways she is "above average on a really good day," how she was "raised in Manhattan, relocated to Chicago in favor of affordable housing with functioning/sunlight-bearing windows, work history including but not limited to opera singing, Wendy's, network news, soap-opera extra, waitressing, talent-management, private tutor, personal assistant/launderer to star of a low-rated situation comedy." And the ad goes on, a 10-page sentence that lists her character defects, the stages and reasons for her search for Owen Wilson, and her awareness that "a story in the form of a personal ad potentially invites a variety of criticisms" (examples of which she then, of course, lists). As we move back and forth in time, Charlotte Anne's strong moral sense scrutinizes the culture shocks of public and private city schools, rebuffs perverts on the street and in friends' high-rise apartments, gets sucked into the catty ways of middle school girls, and analyzes the first probes of high school boys. Slowly she softens with the trials of an ill parent, college alcoholism, and the rollercoaster highs/rejections (she uses slash/word combos a lot) of young adult love. Crane perfectly articulates the fact of fiction in any mind: "although she has since childhood imagined picking up her Oscar, the category has never been determined. There was some thought that by the time she grew up they would give out Oscars for Best Novel (and by then she would have written one), or that she would just get some honorary Oscar for her distinctive life observations made in everyday conversation or . . . ." In her particularity is a wacky sense of the universal as she moves from laugh-out-loud humor to frank emotion and astute observation without skipping a beat. Her rabid energy sometimes overwhelms (so, take a break), but in the end, she seduces because she is witty, wry, self-deprecating, and cynical; more important, underneath it all, she's always hopeful.

-Beth Taylor

From the Chicago Tribune
“What separates Crane’s book from the stacks of chick-lit novels that come out each year in time for beach-towel season is the bold, playful, at times experimental writing style and the infectious, skewed, at times absurdist humor.  Above all, neither Crane nor Charlotte takes herself too seriously while still managing to unearth some deep and beautiful observations about friendship, the mother-daughter bond, the search for a meaningful existence and the essence of healthy relationships.”

-Hagar Scher

From Hartford Courant
“Employing a boatload of commas, dashes, italicized digressions, parenthetical asides and other grammatical steppingstones to help you ford this rushing stream of consciousness, “Ad,” the opener of “All This Heavenly Glory,” plunges us into Crane’s quirky, hypnotic style.  It’s a personal – very personal – ad penned by Charlotte Anne Byers, known also as just Charlotte and sometimes Charlie, and it introduces the character whose life from age 6 to 40 is chronicled here in interconnected stories that add up to a novel.  The stories alternate between first-person accounts and third-person stories of her past, all in that meandering, challenging voice.  It’s a challenge worth accepting – the author has plenty that’s smart, and also quite touching, to say about being young, single and aimless, and Charlotte’s intense, ongoing interior dialogue makes a fine vehicle for it.”

From Edge Boston
“Crane writes with tender sensitivity as Charlotte Anne navigates the troubles that come with age, without ever compromising her sharp sense of wit and humor.”

-Carole Goldberg
				
				
Elizabeth Crane's 'All This Heavenly Glory' is the best kind of storytelling--these alternately charming, joyous, and painful moments of living are rendered in sharp, witty writing that dares you to read on. Each new story surpises you with honesty and wonder.

Joe Meno, author of
HOW THE HULA GIRL SINGS and HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED

Elizabeth Crane writes like a house on fire! the glorious leaping-and-bounding invention of crane's prose blazes through every episode of Charlotte Anne's life with ferocious, infectious, blow-the-fog-out-of-your-brain energy. the kind of real, vital connection that Charlotte Anne craves so ardently and fumblingly for so long is exactly the kind of connection that Elizabeth Crane makes with her readers on the very first page. It all just hits so close--I'd burst out laughing, and then just keep laughing, at Charlotte Anne, at myself, at the world. Elizabeth Crane is like the best of Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth McCracken, Matt Klam and Anthony Lane rolled into one, with David-Foster-Wallace-rivaling, ever-meandering, ever-digressing, ever-illuminating, never-ending sentences that you keep falling so in love with you don't care if they never do end! (which is precisely how you will begin to think and talk upon reading ALL THIS HEAVENLY GLORY, which, by the way, is a wonderful title). Which is all to say, really, that I'd like to be best friends with anyone who feels as understood by this book as I do, but I have a feeling that's going to be more friends than any human being could reasonable manage.

Thisbe Nissen, author of OUT OF THE GIRLS ROOM AND INTO THE NIGHT, THE GOOD PEOPLE OF NEW YORK, and OSPREY ISLAND

All This Heavenly Glory is a diabolically addictive book whose mind-altering prose, a seamless blend of precision and playfulness, somehow manages to invoke both heartbreak and hilarity, all at the same time. Craneâ€™s indefatigable heroine, Charlotte Anne Byers, comes to us in alternating episodes, first as a seventies wise-child disfigured by decency and later as a wizened young woman so determined to claw through the wall of postmodern irony that she takes us all, blinking with bewilderment, into some new and uncharted territory beyond. A stupendous achievement.

Marshall Boswell, author of THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS and ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA