Creatures of Habit

Jill McCorkle's new collection of twelve short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us-flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also animaled with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile-also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids. The insight with which McCorkle tells their stories crackles with wit, but also with a deeper-and more forgiving-wisdom than ever before. In Billy Goats, Fulton's herd of seventh graders cruises the summer nights, peeking into parked cars, maddening the town madman. In Monkeys, a widow holds her husband's beloved spider monkey close along with his deepest secrets. In Dogs, a single mother who works for a veterinarian compares him-unfavorably-with his patients. In Snakes, a seasoned wife sees what might have been a snake in the grass and decides to step over it. And, in the exquisite final story, Fish, a grieving daughter remembers her father's empathy for the ugliest of all fishes. The success behind Jill McCorkle's short stories-and her novels-is, as one reviewer noted, her skill as an archaeologist of the absurd, an expert at excavating and examining the comedy of daily life (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Yes, and also the tragedy.

"Arguably the equal of the best of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, or Flannery O'Connor."
"Creatures of Habit is what coming home should be but so seldom is--comforting, clarifying and irresistible.... Bet you can't read just one."
"With dark humor that effervesces, these stories take as their overt theme the animalness of human behavior."

Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having published her first two novels on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, the New York Times Book Review said: "one suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist. With July 7th, she is also a full grown one." Since then she has published five other novels most recently, Hieroglyphics-- and four collections of short stories. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the Thomas Wolfe Prize; she was recently inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame. McCorkle has taught at Harvard, Brandeis and NC State where she remains affiliated with the MFA Program in creative writing and she is core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Creatures of Habit is so rich, so complete an experience. I marvel at the toughness and the brilliant sensibility. I don't know how Jill McCorkle does it, but she has the power to alter y emotional state with a single sentence, a line, a seemingly off-hand comment.She can make me shiver with sorrow, and then turn around and get me smiling; she can bring me up with startlement; she can make me anxious; she can horrify me, or scare me. With every line, she indicates my awe.The fact is, McCorkle's great gift is her ability to make me forget that I'm reading at all. What she does, I think, is slam me into Life in a way that invigorates me and then makes me intensely aware of being alive myself, of being in my own time, in the world. For me, that is what beautiful writing always does, and this is beautiful writing. (Richard Bausch, author of Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea Praise for Jill McCorkle's stories Haunting, beautifully crafted.Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Jill McCorkle's stories are relentlessly funny.but they use humor to earn a much wider range of emotion. (Los Angeles Times Book Review) An accomplished comic writer who's continually refining here skills and expanding her range, McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty. (Kirkus Reviews)

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