Seven Stories About Tammy

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of nine books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, The Hero of This Book, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. She’s received grants and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her stories have won three Pushcart Prizes, two National Magazine Awards, and have appeared in five editions of The Best American Short Stories. She was awarded the 2026 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. She lives in Bath, Somerset, with her family.

Praise for Seven Stories About Tammy“One of the best things I have ever read in my life. It made me cackle out loud and filled me with joy . . . Elizabeth McCracken is one of our greatest writers.”—Ann Patchett"Seven Stories About Tammy by Elizabeth McCracken, paints a portrait of a complicated family with the concision of a short story and the depth of a novel, and makes it look easy."—Celeste NgPraise for Elizabeth McCracken“There’s a wickedness to McCracken’s technique, the way she lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us. She never misses the infamous 7-10 split, managing to hit Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler with the same ball.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post“McCracken . . . proves her mastery of short fiction with these 12 tightly structured, searingly realistic stories . . . Enduring love—along with the urge to resist it—is this volume’s common theme, whether in relationships between parents and children, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and even in-laws . . . An astonishingly powerful collection worth multiple readings.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“The master stylist and author of Bowlaway rolls another strike with this magnificent array of idiosyncratic love stories.”—Oprah Daily“McCracken, herself, is a hard-working performer, an acrobat who dazzles with her verbal flexibility and lands the end of each tightly composed story with incredible skill—and feeling. Her inimitable images heighten the delight . . . McCracken's writing is never dull . . . [a] fantastic collection.”—NPR“Elizabeth McCracken’s impressive third story collection evoke moving depictions of marriage and parenthood, and love, betrayal, and loneliness . . . A steady stream of exquisite writing.”—Boston Globe“This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders: expatriates and repatriates, Vikings, travelling ventriloquists . . . Whether it’s over the course of a honeymoon in Amsterdam or a day at a Texas water park, McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters’ lives.”—New Yorker“McCracken opens up worlds in a mere sentence, and every page is illuminated with nuanced observations of human behavior.”—Booklist