Half-Lives (Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize)

Schmeidler, Lynn

ISBN 10: 1637680910 / ISBN 13: 9781637680919

Published by Autumn House Press, 2024

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Half-Lives (Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize)
• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1637680910
• ISBN 13: 9781637680919
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A playful debut short story collection imagining women’s lives in a world free of social limitations.
 
Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Playful and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives. A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide.
 
Half-Lives is the 2023 Rising Writer Prize winner, selected by Matt Bell.
 

About the Author

Lynn Schmeidler’s is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In addition to her short story collection Half-Lives, she has published one poetry book, History of Gone (Veliz Books, shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and finalist for the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize), and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines (Grayson Books, Finalist for the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize and the Comstock Review Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Prize) and Curiouser & Curiouser (Winner of the Grayson Books Chapbook Prize). She earned a BA from Yale University and an MEd from Lesley College. She lives in the Hudson Valley.