A Long Game

[McCracken is] not your usual wise old literary hand. Instead, she is naughty, perverse, quietly exhibitionist and bracingly unashamed… This attitude will be amazingly freeing for the many rule-haunted writers * Guardian *
[A Long Game is] a welcome chance to spend time with McCracken’s mind, which you can feel stretching with pleasure throughout… [a] lovely and energising book – Megan Nolan * Observer *
McCracken…include[s] all sorts of gems of wisdom… For anyone who wants to write a novel, or for anyone who loves reading novels…A Long Game is a joy * Sunday Times *
Wonderful tough love, direct, and very funny advice on how to be the writer you want to be – Ann Patchett
Elizabeth McCracken was my teacher, and it’s a joy to know that now more people will have access to her brilliance through A Long Game… A guidebook for any fiction writer, and a problem-solving and cheering companion that makes writing a less lonely business – Yiyun Li
Elizabeth McCracken is that rarest of combinations – a world class writer and a world class writing teacher. With A Long Game she has distilled the electric, inspiring genius, enthusiasm, and wit that she has brought to the classroom for more than three decades and put it into a book that’s practically a masters program in itself – Paul Harding
Elizabeth McCracken, one of the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane writers you will ever encounter, has written one the greatest, wisest, funniest, and most humane books about writing you will ever read. Have a pen ready. You’ll want to underline sentences on every page that make you stop and think or inwardly cheer or nod in recognition. Most importantly, you’ll want to run to your desk and write. A Long Game is an absolute gift – Cristina Henríquez
On the one hand, as a superfan of Elizabeth McCracken, I am cranky that others will benefit from her wisdom. On the other hand, any excuse to spend time with McCracken’s intelligent and unpretentious voice is a gift. This is not just an indispensable craft book but a writer’s argument with herself about what, in fact, constitutes craft – Karan Mahajan
A deeply practical book that is also beautifully written, that is also somehow a page turner. It is, like McCracken’s fiction, a crystalline distillation of her warm, funny and no-nonsense voice. When I finished reading it, I couldn’t decide if what I wanted to do immediately was write fiction or just turn back to page one and read it again – Asali Solomon
A Long Game is the most generous, idiosyncratic, useful, and companionable book on writing I’ve ever read. It’s basically a portable Elizabeth McCracken. How did we get so lucky? – Antoine Wilson
A Long Game is a manual that I will return to again and again, and am so grateful to have it in my toolkit as a writer. To have a book like this to turn to is a comfort and a lifeline. McCracken is as honest and incisive in A Long Game as she is in fiction. I would encourage every writer to read it – Rebecca Ivory
A gift for writers, A Long Game is warm and bolstering, straight-talking, practical and tough – Jessica Stanley
Like a jaded, long-suffering wise-cracking friend that will make you feel like someone is going through the pain barrier with you – Sam Baker * The Shift *

Elizabeth McCracken is the award-winning author of eight books including The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award), and The Hero of This Book (winner of the Wingate Prize). She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty best American writers under forty. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.

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