A review by seeceeread
Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

I find it hard enough to compromise with the facts of living: a need for vitamins, the ringing telephone.  Life yells: accept me, take care of this, you're not paying attention. Compromise with a person? Out of the question.

A runaway father who seems genuinely confused about why his son won't hug him, decades later. A near-comatose wife whose first intelligible syllables to her husband are about his waistline. A child prodigy who, as an adult, feigns stupidity about everything and refuses to answer most questions. A woman without arms, who, once reunited with a little person who performed beside her at the circus, must confront her children's ableism. An elderly man who killed his wife decades ago, and now paroled, struggles to forge bonds in the present. 

McCracken mines intensely awkward and painful moments for onyx humor. She neatly contextualizes oddballs, clarifying just why people don't quite fit together – substantive differences in age, size, temperament – while letting their friction generate its own momentum. 

Many lovely sentences are best understood as part of a McCracken funhouse tale. She slips in a lil social commentary but this is mostly a collection of absurd premises dressed in thoughtful detail. I enjoyed following the author down each narrow, ridiculous passage, as well as where we arrived.