Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books: Here’s
Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), the novels The
Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the
memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination,
and the most recent collection Thunderstruck & Other Stories, which won the 2015 Story Prize. A former public librarian, she is now a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin. She didn’t read Jane Eyre until she was in her mid-thirties. Her absent-mindedness about reading it meant the amazing gift of a great book that she had nearly no misconceptions about: she sat on a rented sofa in rural Denmark and fell in love with it.