Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0316096520, Hardcover)

The women in WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT are fierce and kind, damaged and optimistic. They are recovering from loss or addiction or betrayal, they are on the fringes of reality or sanity or a "conventional" life. From a woman who decides to live on the patio rooftop of her friend's apartment building, to the bestselling memoir writer who finds her identity overtaken by the actress cast in the movie version, to the daughter convinced her dead mother is in fact simply stuck at a North Dakota bus depot, their experiences of loss and love are both uniquely theirs and universal.

With disarming humor, honesty, and playfulness, Elizabeth Crane gleefully and memorably explores the absurdities and possibilities of modern life.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0316608467, Paperback)

Few literary debuts (and even fewer story collections) generate the kind of heated excitement and critical adoration that have greeted WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT-but Elizabeth Crane is the exception to many rules. Her stories, celebrated for their hilarity, their wry and intimate tone, and their keen insight, buzz with the acute ache of first loves and first heartbreaks, death and resurrection, addiction and recovery. The women whose lives Crane so tenderly yet unflinchingly opens up to us experience love and loss in a way that is at once uniquely their own and universal.