Jill McCorkle, Old Crimes: Stories

We could not be more pleased than we are to welcome back Jill McCorkle for her latest collection of stories. Keebe and Sarah love, love, LOVE this collection, and you will, too! Each one of these stories is a world unto itself, and you will delight in the fact that you can devour a story in an evening and relish that time well spent with a good read.

Jill McCorkle, author of the New York Times bestseller Life After Life and the widely acclaimed Hieroglyphics, who is considered “one of our wryest, warmest, wisest storytellers” (included four times in the Best American Short Stories), delivers another breathtaking collection of stories that take an intimate look at the moments when a person’s life changes forever.

Old Crimes takes readers deep into the lives of characters who hold their secrets and misdeeds close, even as the past continues to reverberate over time and across generations. And despite the characters’ yearnings for connection, they can’t seem to tell the whole truth. In “Low Tones,” a woman uses her hearing impairment as a way to guard herself from her husband’s commentary. In “Lineman,” a telephone lineman tries to keep his family close as he feels himself pushed aside in a digital world. The young couple in “Confessional” buys a confessional for fun, only to discover the cost of honesty.

Profoundly moving and unforgettable, the stories in Jill McCorkle’s new collection reveal why she has long been considered a master of the form. Each story reads like a compact, brilliantly condensed novel, probing lives full of great intensity, of longing and affection, of deep regret, and of the inability to ever forget an old crime.

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.