Jill McCorkle has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 12 narrators. The most-rated is Hieroglyphics.
Final Vinyl Days
Summary
When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning of new life by visiting with a very old neighbor who's waiting, too, for his own new life. In these and the rest of the nine stories, Jill McCorkle acts on her penchant for taming the outrageous, humanizing the forbidden, and grounding the hilarious.
©1998 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Going Away Shoes
Summary
The foibles of the people in Jill McCorkle’s world are so familiar that we want nothing so much as to watch them walk into - and then get out of - life's inevitable traps. Here, in her first collection in eight years, McCorkle collects 11 brand-new stories bristling with her characteristic combination of wit and weight. In honeymoon shoes, mud-covered hunting boots, or glass slippers, all of the women in these stories march to a place of new awareness, in one way or another, transforming their lives. They make mistakes, but they don’t waste time hiding behind them. They move on. They are strong. And they’re funny, even when they are sad.These stories are the work of a great storyteller who knows exactly how - and why - to pair pain with laughter.
©2009 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Creatures of Habit
Summary
Jill McCorkle's new collection of 12 short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us - flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also "animaled" with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile - also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids. The insight with which McCorkle tells their stories crackles with wit, but also with a deeper - and more forgiving - wisdom than ever before. In "Billy Goats", Fulton's herd of seventh graders cruises the summer nights, peeking into parked cars, maddening the town madman. In "Monkeys", a widow holds her husband's beloved spider monkey close, along with his deepest secrets. In "Dogs", a single mother who works for a veterinarian compares him - unfavorably - with his patients. In "Snakes", a seasoned wife sees what might have been a snake in the grass and decides to step over it. And, in the exquisite final story, "Fish", a grieving daughter remembers her father's empathy for the ugliest of all fishes. The success behind Jill McCorkle's short stories - and her novels - is, as one reviewer noted, her skill as an archaeologist of the absurd, an expert at excavating and examining the comedy of daily life (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Yes, and also the tragedy. The complete list of narrators includes Claire Slemmer, Allyson Johnson, Allison McLemore, Lauren Fortgang, Margaret Daly, Holly Fielding, Elizabeth Evans, and Gabra Zackman.
©2001 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Life After Life
Summary
Jill McCorkle’s first novel in 17 years is alive with the daily triumphs and challenges of the residents and staff of Pine Haven Estates, a retirement facility now home to a good many of Fulton, North Carolina’s older citizens. Among them, third-grade teacher Sadie Randolph, who has taught every child in town and believes we are all eight years old in our hearts; Stanley Stone, once Fulton’s most prominent lawyer, now feigning dementia to escape life with his son; Marge Walker, the town’s self-appointed conveyor of social status who keeps a scrapbook of every local murder and heinous crime; and Rachel Silverman, recently widowed, whose decision to leave her Massachusetts home and settle in Fulton is a mystery to everyone but her. C.J., the pierced and tattooed young mother who runs the beauty shop, and Joanna, the hospice volunteer who discovers that her path to a good life lies with helping folks achieve good deaths, are two of the staff on whom the residents depend. McCorkle puts her finger on the pulse of every character’s strengths, weaknesses, and secrets. And, as she connects their lives through their present circumstances, their pasts, and, in some cases, their deaths, she celebrates the blessings and wisdom of later life and infuses this remarkable novel with hope and laughter.
©2013 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Crash Diet
Summary
Modern stories for modern times, Crash Diet is at once brilliant and bitter, happy and heartbreaking. In 11 stories, acclaimed novelist Jill McCorkle tells the varied tales of today's southern women, the lives they end up leading, and the loves that distract them. Sandra knows that the best revenge is her ex-husband's credit card; Ruthie is stuck owning a motel that the highway has bypassed; Anna is a widow who goes to airports and looks in on other people's lives; Bunny waits eagerly for her absent sister's postcards for advice on how to live.Stuck in the slow lane, gunning their motors, they are women living the real life, hoping things will get better, but surprised when they occasionally do.
©1996 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Cheer Leader
Summary
Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it - straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early '70s, her carefully normal life explodes and she comes completely undone. In The Cheer Leader, Jo Spencer looks back, as if she were watching reruns of old syndicated TV shows, to figure out what happened. Ordinary chance has dumped Sam Swett, age 21, in the Marshboro, North Carolina, Quik Pik in the middle of a murder. Sam has shaved his head, given away all his belongings except his typewriter; he's drunker than he's ever been and running as fast as he can from his upper-middle-class upbringing. For the next 24 hours, Sam is propelled straight into the very core of this small Southern town as it sorts through the facts.
©1984 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Hieroglyphics
Summary
Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both - suddenly, tragically - lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely. Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries - perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d rather forget. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember. Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world all around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.
©2020 Jill McCorkle (P)2020 Recorded Books