The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa: Stories

Welcome to the curious world of Elizabeth Stuckey-French.  Her exuberant collection is peopled with characters who walk a thin line between reality and delusion, trying to break out of their molds and live a little. With stylish, wry writing, Stuckey-French creates intelligent, poignant, funny fiction.

Her characters--mostly Midwesterners trying to make sense of a changing world--are bizarre but strangely lovable.  They may lie to make their situations better, but the stories have a resounding emotional truth.

In "Junior," we meet a dog psychic who enlists her troubled niece in a moneymaking scheme.  In "Electric Wizard," grieving parents beg a teacher to invent poetry and pretend their dead son wrote it.  And in the title story, the mother of two young children drives east on a disordered impulse through a blizzard and picks up a gas station attendant along the way.  Several of these stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and literary reviews, where her work has received recognition and praise.

In Stuckey-French's striking fictional world, powerful emotional forces roil the outwardly placid surfaces of her characters' lives--our notions of "normal" are permanently altered, and yet these stories have a generosity of spirit that cannot fail to strike a chord with all of us.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Elizabeth Stuckey-French has been awarded a James Michener Fellowship, and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and other literary magazines.  She teaches fiction writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.