Creatures of Habit (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Description

McCorkle takes us back to her longtime fictional home town, Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters that have much in common with the so-called lesser species. The voices with which McCorkle tells their stories crackle with wit, but also with a deeper-and more forgiving-wisdom than ever before.

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July 7th (Front Porch Paperbacks)

Description

An unsolved murder at the Quik Pik propels us into twenty-four hours of rich comedy and fast action in the North Carolina town of Marshboro. Two memorable presences are Granner Weeks, a white widow, and Fannie McNair, a black housekeeper. They know that people learn to live by living with each other--in each other's ways and in each other's hearts. "With these JULY 7th and The CHEER LEADER . . . McCorkle emerges as the most exciting young American writer of fiction to come along in years."--Cleveland Plain Dealer.

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Final Vinyl Days: And Other Stories

Description

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning of new life by visiting with a very old neighbor who's waiting, too, for his own new life. In these and the rest of the nine stories, Jill McCorkle acts on her penchant for taming the outrageous, humanizing the forbidden, and grounding the hilarious.

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With titles such as "Dysfunction 101," "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us," and "It's a Funeral! RSVP," it's clear that when you open Jill McCorkle's Final Vinyl Days, you're not signing up for Remembrance of Things Past. Still, if Proust grew up in the newly air-conditioned South, listening to Marvin Gaye and sneaking contraband cigarettes in the local graveyard, who knows, he might have produced tales like these. Garrulous, earthy, and firmly grounded in the most mundane details of life, McCorkle's stories strain at the edges of their slight plots. The pleasure here lies mostly in listening to these voices run on--and they do run on, in monologues both withering and affectionate. "He was real handsome, when he was all cleaned up, but I couldn't stop thinking of his head as a maraca, like the ones I loved to shake in elementary school; he had little tiny specks of information rolling around in his head and making enough sound that he didn't seem like a zombie," one narrator recalls of an old boyfriend. McCorkle is a master of both the properly placed italic and the telling pop-culture detail; the mistress of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" announces, "I'm the test wife and he tries everything on me first, I mean everything. Remember when he got hooked on the massage oil that heats up with body temp? Now maybe you liked it, but I sure didn't. I got a rash, but of course, I have extremely sensitive skin and always have. I mean, I am Clinique all the way." Not all of these stories are funny--the divorced mother of "A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World," for instance, runs on little more than fear and adrenaline--but even those that are have strong undercurrents of tragedy. The narrator of "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us" wryly trashes her own big "peasant" feet, tells the wife to make her husband behave, confesses her loneliness, then makes herself disappear: "But don't let him off easy. Pitch a blue blazing fit. Scream, curse, throw things. Let him have it, honey. Your husband is cheating on us. Let him have it. And when all is said and done, please just forget that I was ever here; that I ever walked the earth. After all, I'm Big Foot. Who knows if I even exist." Divorce, sibling rivalries, missing parents, and deathbed advice: only McCorkle could shine a light into these dark corners of the human heart with such good grace and wit. --Mary Park

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Ferris Beach

Description

Ferris Beach is a place where excitement and magic coexist. Or so Mary Katherine "Katie" Burns, the only child of middle-aged Fred and Cleva Burns, believes. Shy and self-conscious, she daydreams about Ferris Beach, where her beautiful cousin, Angela, leads a romantic, mysterious life.

It is the early 1970s, and when the land across the road from the Burns's historic house is sold to developers, Misty Rhodes—also from Ferris Beach—and her flamboyant parents move into the nearest newly built split-level. In contrast to Katie’s composed, reserved, practical mother, Misty and her mother are everything Katie wants to be: daring, outrageous, fun. The two girls become inseparable, sharing every secret, every dream—until one fateful Fourth of July, when their lives change in a way they could never have imagined.

In this classic McCorkle novel, the author's shrewd grasp of human nature creates characters that resonate with truth and emotion, and a story perfect for mothers and daughters to share and cherish.

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The Cheer Leader (Front Porch Paperbacks)

Description

Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it-straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early seventies, her carefully normal life explodes and she comes completely undone. In The Cheerleader, Jo Spencer looks back, as if she were watching reruns of old syndicated TV shows, to figure out what happened.

Ordinary chance has dumped Sam Swett, age twenty-one, in the Marshboro, North Carolina, Quik Pik in the middle of a murder. Sam has shaved his head, given away all his belongings except his typewriter; he's drunker than he's ever been and running as fast as he can from his upper-middle-class upbringing. For the next twenty-four hours, Sam is propelled straight into the very core of this small Southern town as it sorts through the facts.

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Crash Diet: Stories

Description

"Invigorating . . . Savagely effective . . . Displays the same wit and ironic compassion that gained so many fans for her novels."
--The New York Times Book Review

Modern stories for modern times, Crash Diet is at once brilliant and bitter, happy and heartbreaking. In eleven stories, acclaimed novelist Jill McCorkle tells the varied tales of today's southern women, the lives they end up leading, and the loves that distract them. Sandra knows that the best revenge is her ex-husband's credit card; Ruthie is stuck owning a motel that the highway has bypassed; Anna is a widow who goes to airports and looks in on other people's lives; Bunny waits eagerly for her absent sister's postcards for advice on how to live.

Stuck in the slow lane, gunning their motors, they are women living the real life, hoping things will get better, but surprised when they occasionally do.

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