Jill McCorkle

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...

Here, from the remarkable novelist who wrote Ferris Beach, Tending to Virginia, July 7th, and The Cheer Leader, is Jill McCorkle's first book of short fiction. These eleven sparkling, uninhibited stories address her favorite subject: women who take matters into their own hands. McCorkle has yet again produced irrepressibly frank and funny portraits of remarkable characters. Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having published her first two novels...

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

In the course of this wide-ranging, richly detailed novel, every kind of human problem finds its way to the doorstep of Quee Purdy, a tireless entrepreneur for whom love and sex are the "hot commodities" in which she deals. McCorkle's extraordinary storytelling skills allow her to juggle at least six parallel stories in a novel about playing God. And she does it divinely. Jill McCorkle's first two novels were released simultaneously when she was...

"A collection of stories that take an intimate look at the moments when a person's life changes forever"--