Story Prize Archives -

Litstack Rec: Thunderstruck & Other Stories & Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Thunderstruck & Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken Early on in Elizabeth McCracken’s extraordinary story collection, Thunderstruck, a grieving mother instructs her seventeen year-old son to seal up the room of his dead sister. This, she imagines will somehow purge the house of the evil that caused her daughter’s lymphoma. “Don’t touch a thing. Just seal [….]

LitStack Rec: Thunderstruck & Other Stories & Baseball’s Great Experiment

Birthdays

On this day, December 10, in 1930, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Perhaps poetry’s most famous recluse, most of her friendships came through correspondences. While many knew she was a writer, only about a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime and those were drastically edited to fit literary conventions of the time. After her death in 1886 (at age 55, most likely of kidney disease), her younger sister found almost 1,800 poems tucked away at her residence. The first collection of her poems was published four years later – but again, heavily edited. It was not until 1955 that her poems began to become available in unedited form.