The Good Life

by Erin McGraw

Erin McGraw's fiction has been hailed as graceful . . . gratifyingly substantial (New York Times Book Review) and brilliant... [she's] a writer to watch (Los Angeles Times). Wry but poignant, her new collection brims with priceless insights and fresh descriptions. The Good Life features characters battling daily demons of envy, fear, and disillusionment while somehow maintaining an abiding optimism. Here are characters trying to weather the confounding...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618386270
• ISBN13: 9780618386277
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Shout it from the rooftops

Hallelujah! Finally, there is a literary writer out there who can create page-turning stories with characters who are so real that you'll nearly weep with recognition. Erin McGraw's work is a miracle--her characters leap directly from the page into your hearts. After reading so many well-lauded authors who risk nothing but cynicism and ennui in their works, I find Erin McGraw's fiction to be nothing short of delicious. Her stories inhabit the full range of human emotions, and I can only hope she will be very prolific to keep up with the demand she generates with her fiction.

Erin McGraw Tells it Straight (and Crooked)

First, you must know about the priests. They are fumbling against desire, broken-hearted, broken in many places, mean-spirited sometimes. One is fat. Another dips long and deep into the wine and falls in love too easily. McGraw lets them trip and fall, exposes their dark secrets, and just as the melancholy settles around your shoulders, she lets fly her sad, funny language. From amid the crumbling (of the lives of priests, sure, but of many other souls as well) the reader will find a wellspring of humanity. These stories are laden with compassion, beauty, and sorrow, and not a small portion of hope. I'll let you know you'll love the priests, but I'll leave to you the joy of discovering the others. Buy the book.

Divinely Human

Erin McGraw doesn't make things easy for her readers -- but as we watch a tormented priest stuff his face at the refrigerator, as we feel our own overwhelming hunger for food and compassion and mercy, as we waltz with two men (the one we love and the one we married), as we lose our beards and endure ridicule, as we discover our husbands have betrayed us for decades, as we scatter the ashes of the woman who has been our rival, Erin McGraw makes us feel the giddy wonder of it all with a quiver of humor and deep waves of sorrow. I am in awe of her patient attention to each heart-breaking, tender detail, and I am inspired by the grace she finds in the lives of her suffering, divinely human people.