ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lynn Schmeidler’s fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KR Online, the Southern Review, and other publications, and she won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest for her short story “InventEd.” She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the author of the poetry book History of Gone and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

REVIEWS

“Half-Lives is an extraordinary debut, an endlessly smart, endlessly cool, endlessly moving collection full of evocative desire and wonder. Schmeidler has a gift for hooky, high concept openings, plus the chops to deliver on those promises in ways you might not see coming. I’ve rarely been so consistently surprised by a short story writer; I can’t wait to reread these stories and be amazed all over again.”

— Matt Bell, author of "Appleseed"

"Reading Half-Lives is as thrilling and strange as finding Franz Kafka in a patch picking blueberries for Donald Barthelme and Shirley Jackson. I laughed out loud one thousand times. I don’t know how she did it, but Schmeidler has taken the world off its hinges and hung it back on brilliantly askew. These slanted stories swing wildly, and the breeze their swinging makes is a relief we now desperately need."

— Sabrina Orah Mark, author of "Happily"

"Half-Lives is not a half depiction of anything, but rather a full and delightfully teeming portrait of women’s lives as they grow up and grow older. Schmeidler’s got a wonderful sense of rhythm—here time races by, here it slows down to a glorious drip—and her stories contain gymnastic feats—back handsprings of language and structural contortions. I admired and enjoyed this playful and profound collection."

— Emily Nemens, author of "The Cactus League"

"Among a great number of extraordinary submissions to this contest, Schmeidler’s 'InventEd' was the one I found myself circling back to again and again to reexperience its unusual effects until I felt I couldn’t deny the purchase the story had found on my attention, which was almost embarrassing. The story balances an insouciant warmth and humor against a vertiginous glimpse into the mysteries of solipsism, longing, and the risk of dissolving the self in intersubjective desire. Plus, it’s goofy."

— Jonathan Lethem, 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest Judge, on the story "InventEd" from the book

"There’s a lot about Schmeidler’s collection Half-Lives that piques my interest, including acclaim from the likes of Matt Bell and Jonathan Lethem. Sabrina Orah Mark citing the likes of Shirley Jackson and Franz Kafka in her praise for it is also intriguing—as is the way the stories allude to everything from fairy tales to Airbnb."

— Reactor Mag, on "Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for March and April 2024"

"Schmeidler’s entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women’s bodies and sexuality. . . . Schmeidler’s offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre."

— Publishers Weekly

"A stunning debut by an author who is unafraid to write evocatively, experimentally, and with a raw vulnerability that will inevitably stir contemplation and conversation. Challenging stigmas and the silence which surround issues of women’s autonomy, as well as their mental and physical health, Schmeidler has crafted sixteen stories that speak to the deepest (and at times uncomfortable) truths about what it means to walk through this world as a woman. Utilizing humor and metaphor, these stories will undoubtedly resonate with the countless women who have ever felt judged, abused, misunderstood, or just downright confused by their existence."

— Master's Review

"The stories are limned with absurdity and dark humor, but they deal with serious matters. And clues to the meaning lie in the surreal elements."

— Texas Public Radio

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sex Was Everywhere
The Wanting Beach
I You She
Corpse Pose
The Future Was Vagina Forward
The Audio Guide
InventEd
Joke, Deconstructed
Being Stevie
Feel Better
Half-Lives
Plural Like the Universe
Tiny House
Happy Birthday
Deep Hollow Close
The Time Museum

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