Creatures of Habit Paperback - 2003

First line

WE USED TO all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes.

From the rear cover

Creatures of Habit is so rich, so complete an experience. I marvel at the toughness and the brilliant sensibility.

I don't know how Jill McCorkle does it, but she has the power to alter y emotional state with a single sentence, a line, a seemingly off-hand comment.She can make me shiver with sorrow, and then turn around and get me smiling; she can bring me up with startlement; she can make me anxious; she can horrify me, or scare me. With every line, she indicates my awe.The fact is, McCorkle's great gift is her ability to make me forget that I'm reading at all.

What she does, I think, is slam me into Life in a way that invigorates me and then makes me intensely aware of being alive myself, of being in my own time, in the world. For me, that is what beautiful writing always does, and this is beautiful writing. (Richard Bausch, author of Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

Praise for Jill McCorkle's stories

Haunting, beautifully crafted.Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Jill McCorkle's stories are relentlessly funny.but they use humor to earn a much wider range of emotion. (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

An accomplished comic writer who's continually refining here skills and expanding her range, McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty. (Kirkus Reviews)