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Eric Puchner

Biography

Eric Puchner

In addition to DREAM STATE, Eric Puchner is the author of the novel MODEL HOME, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of a California Book Award, and two collections of short stories, LAST DAY ON EARTH and MUSIC THROUGH THE FLOOR, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Best American Short Stories 2012 and 2017.

He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  An associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.

Eric Puchner

Books by Eric Puchner

by Eric Puchner - Fiction

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task --- an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

by Eric Puchner - Fiction, Short Stories

A boy on the edge of adolescence fears his mother might be a robot; a psychotically depressed woman is entrusted with taking her niece and nephew trick-or-treating; a reluctant dad brings his baby to a coke-fueled party; a teenage boy tries to prevent his mother from putting his estranged father’s dogs to sleep. Ranging from a youth arts camp to an aging punk band’s reunion tour, from a dystopian future where parents no longer exist to a ferociously independent bookstore, LAST DAY ON EARTH revolves around the endlessly complex, frequently surreal system that is family.