elizabeth crane

New Pioneers of the American Short Story: Tom Bissell

When she is at her best, one feels that Crane has struggled and succeeded to communicate something she has learned through much toil. At her infrequent worst, one feels simply unloaded upon: Here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about—don’t ask me what it means. But one reads anyway, goaded by Crane’s intensely personal vision, and there is no higher praise than that. Something is happening to the short story in these piqued and spiky pages, something not yet successful enough to praise unreservedly, but something compelling enough to make one eagerly await Crane’s next book.

-Boston Review

"Crane has a distinctive and eccentric voice that is consistent and riveting from the first story to the last, and 'When The Messenger is Hot' expresses a remarkably strong and coherent artistic vision..."

- The New York Times Book Review

from the DAILY CANDY NYC

Girls, Not Interrupted

Here's the thing about psycho chicks: They're kinda boring.

Met one, met 'em all. Pick a -- yawn -- issue: (1) obsessive phone calls or e-mails (the Stalker); (2) dependence on a neverending supply of psychopharms (Miss Any-Little-Pill-Will-Do); (3) inability to stop dating abusive guys (the Why-Can't-You-Just-Love-Me Chick).

This might explain why Elizabeth Crane's debut short-story collection, When the Messenger Is Hot, is so delightful. The women in her stories may be a little off-kilter (what with their rehab and their hopeless love affairs), but they're clever, original, and kind of silly about it all. Never self-indulgent or whiny. (Imagine!) Which is to say maybe she's come undone, but she's done so elegantly. Kudos to Crane for capturing her characters in charming, rambling, yet insightful interior monologues.

And here's hoping this starts a trend: psycho chicks actually worth talking to.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY RECOMMENDS: BOOKS

"After Bridget Jones click-clacked through town, any woman who wrote about being young and alone in an urban center was lumped into the derisively dubbed Chick Lit genre. And yes, some of those girls weren't worth your time or money. I hope the same fate doesn't await Elizabeth Crane. Her debut short-story collection, ''When the Messenger Is Hot,'' covers its fair share of romantic woe, but Crane, whose voice is sharp and smart and wholly sympathetic, is no cheap knockoff. The book is dedicated to the author's father and the memory of her mother, and her mom is all over these stories. ''Return From the Depot!'' is about a daughter who swears her mother didn't really die of cancer; she's just stuck at a bus stop 60 miles southeast of Minot, North Dakota. In ''Year-at-a-Glance,'' a young woman can't stop marking time after she loses her mother to lung cancer: ''Month two: I resent anyone who still has a mom and speaks about it openly in front of me.'' Lucky for us Crane isn't one of those goofy-feely types. She's funny, even when her subject is pain. In ''An Intervention,'' a woman who misses her mom and can't meet a decent man finds a sense of belonging at Alcoholics Anonymous. But her old friends are worried because she's only been drunk once, in college, off apricot brandy sours. So they confront her with their fears that she's a substance-abuse-group addict. ''I presented all the evidence of my growth as a person and the details of my levels of feeling and they wanted to know why then was I coming home from the grocery store with my pajamas on?'' There's an energy and immediacy to these stories that make them feel as if they could have been delivered in one beautiful, raw rant over a bottle of wine. A night reading them is a night well spent."

By Karen Valby
Grade: A-

"...what's most remarkable about Crane's wry, deliberately absurd tales is their overwhelming current of sorrow. Crane may hit the funny bone more often than not, but she's secretly taking dead aim at the heart. ...Crane's stories are like Bridget Jones' Diary but without any answers, without the happy ending."

-Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

"While the subjects in Elizabeth Crane's debut short story collection are all damaged and neurotic members of the fairer sex, they transcend the histrionic femme fatales from the early days of chick lit. Crane's heroines are comfortable with internal chaos. ...Crane's women are spirited and celebratory, reminding us that there is much joy to be had in being smart and a little nuts."

-Contents magazine

Curl Up With...
"The stories in this collection - a woman starts believing she's a major movie star, a daughter is convinced her mother isn't dead, just stuck in North Dakota - are strangely moving evocations of how it's possible to be both smart and dumb, wise and clueless, lost and found."

-Glamour magazine

"Elizabeth Crane's story collection When the Messenger Is Hot avoids the trap of melancholy cuteness by sidestepping the conventions of the form. Instead of the usual third-person narrative overstuffed with meticulously collected images like a neurotic hobbyist's scrapbook, Crane offers up first-person tales that are fast-paced and conversational and rambling and frank. ... A boldly original collection."

-The Washington Post

WHEN THE WRITER IS HOT
The former teacher, video store clerk and Macaulay Culkin tutor spent years watching friends get famous. Now it looks as if it's her turn... Adam Langer read the TRIBUNE article "Crane off-handedly toys with assumptions about reality as her characters change shape, indulge in elaborate fantasies (one accompanied by elaborate footnotes), and even, in 'Something Shiny,' slowly disappear. Clever, inventive, and piquant, Crane's breathless stories hit the brain with more voltage than a double espresso."

- Booklist

"...When The Messenger is Hot sets out a unique, intriguing and often hilarious vision. Crane's heroines have been around the block a few times but still have tread on their tires and an off-key song in their hearts. The world they're given to navigate is unpredictable, the fates capricious, the winds tricky, and yet they press forward, holding onto their hats. I haven't seen women quite like them anywhere else."

-Carol Anshaw, Chicago Tribune

"Crane's When the Messenger Is Hot, which is easily described as painfully honest and clever... volunteers to take the reader on a wild ride of emotions, always pushing boundaries and toying with our sensibilities."

- Publisher's Weekly Daily for Booksellers

"The narrators of Elizabeth Crane's hilariously off-kilter debut collection could use a little help. They have man troubles, drinking troubles; most of them teeter on the edge of sanity.... In a day and age when drug companies advertise a pill for every pain, there's something utterly refreshing about the way Crane's narrators bareback their way through life's rough spots, pharmaceutical-free, refusing easy closure.... Crane has created an entirely original style that is one part stand-up routine, two parts confessional....Crane is so adept at immersing a reader in her narrators' consciousness, that such surreal narrative twists feel right and true."

-John Freeman,
The San Francisco Chronicle

First Time Out
"I hope someday that Elizabeth Crane becomes a really really famous writer so that I can say, with pride, that I recommended her first book. In fact, the more I think about what that day will be like - that day when she is really really famous which, in fact, could be tomorrow - it could almost be like saying "I knew her back in the day," or like saying, "Oh yeah, I went to college with her." In fact, maybe if I'm really really lucky and I play my cards right, she will someday write a story about a critic she never met who wrote about wishing she knew her when and, somehow, it would be true. That's the kind of thing that happens in the world of Elizabeth Crane - anything can come true that can be imagined. When The Messenger Is Hot, Crane's first published collection of stories, is a fireball of the imagination, a whopper of a debut, a quiet stunner. At first, she lulls readers with sentences that never end, with thoughts that twist and turn into unexpected corners, and it seems as if you are sitting in a Starbucks on a city corner (usually Chicago but not always) listening in on someone's private thoughts. Then the turns become more surreal and before you know it you are laughing until you cry or crying until you laugh - it's hard to say which - because either these stories, taken as a whole, are tragicomic or they are, possibly, comitragic, which seems more appropriately offbeat, more twisted, more surreal corner of the world as words go. It's all about expectations. If what you expect is to laugh, you'll cry. And vice-versa....If you want to know what it's like to be a thinking person in tragicomic world, if you are a thinking person and you know the world is tragicomic, if you're male, female, old, young, romantic, sardonic, happy, sad, goofy, brilliant, all of the above - read When The Messenger Is Hot."
-Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times

"Being addicted to AA (but not alcohol), living with the actress starring in the movie of your life, and dating 100 guys named Dave are just a few of the scenarios in Elizabeth Crane's whimsical short story collection."

- Marie Claire's 10 Best February 2003

-"The voice is so damn clever it made me think the fringe might not be such a bad place to visit."

-Jane magazine

"Vibrant and original stories that introduce a wonderful new voice"

Kate Atkinson, author of BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM and EMOTIONALLY WEIRD

"These stories' virtues complement each other: on one side, they're sexy and funny, they're told with ardent fluency and they embrace themes that resonate across the board. And then they're poignant, wise, and uncompromising, and candid about the particularities of one woman's life. WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT is the winning debut of a gifted writer."

Ken Kalfus, author of THIRST and PU-239

"The fuzzy-brained among us will tag the stories herein as accounts of modern love gone wrong. But Elizabeth Crane is after far bigger game: the crisis of identity that lies at the center of all romantic woe. Her stories are short, sharp, and shocking -- wry, wounded cries of the heart in extremis."

Steve Almond, author of MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL

"Elizabeth Crane's heroines' non-stop talk is the twin to their lip-biting silence, just as their street-smarts are partner to their dead-on confusion. What will make you surrender at once to their fractured selves - the alcoholic who isn't an alcoholic, the girlfriend with no boyfriend, the tall skinny girl who's short and fat - is that behind their self-absorbtion lies a social commentary marked by an exhilarated sadness, a most down to earth lunacy. Unexpectedly, each splintered voice finds itself speaking a single, inviolate message, like the colored shards coalescing on the far end of the kaleidoscope."

Abby Frucht, author of POLLY'S GHOST and LIFE BEFORE DEATH

"Elizabeth Crane's writing scintillates with melancholy energy. I enjoyed this collection a lot."

Darcey Steinke, author of SUICIDE BLONDE

'Messenger' has quirky tales to tell "Writer Elizabeth Crane has dispatched a lovely billet-doux just in time for that most dreaded of holidays: Valentine's Day. A collection of short stories, When theMessenger Is Hot, explores love and its many permutations, from sexual passion to the illusion of young love now remembered to grief over a mother's death (at 63) to a lonely protagonist's relationship with a ghost baby. It's strong evidence of Crane's abundant literary gifts that the reader accepts and believes the story about Christina, a baby who toddled off a porch, died and inhabits the house where she once lived. The opening tale can only be described as a showstopper. "The Archetype's Girlfriend" ... delineates perfectly the eternal allure of certain dangerous women... The story deconstructs the appeal of being cool, mysterious and utterly emotionally unavailable. ...As Crane makes fully apparent, love is neither rational nor sensible. Not all the stories deal explicitly with love. Alcoholism and recovery is an undercurrent. But Crane doesn't haul out any soapboxes. ...Though Crane's stories deal with serious issues - love, dishonesty, betrayal, grief, drinking, sadness - her tone displays polish, humor and a delectable lightness that should not be confused with shallow writing. Crane writes effectively from a variety of ages, from women dating much younger men to unmarried women in their late 30s to fetching young things barely hatched from college. ...This is the perfect Valentine's Day bonbon for people whose romantic histories can most charitably be described as checkered. Women who met, married, and remain rapturous a half-century later with the guy who asked them to the senior prom probably will not understand the errors made and misery suffered by Crane's characters. But those with imagination will appreciate her book. The rest of us, the damaged masses, most certainly will.

-Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY