Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater

About the Author Julie Orringer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in San Francisco.

About the Book

“A daughter slowly watches her mother die, a sister swims against her brother’s misplaced rage, and a pair of teenage girls drive through the night to find themselves and their selfworth. These stories and others are collected here in this stunning debut collection. “The winner of several literary prizes, Orringer proves herself a dedicated and compassionate shadowed by the struggles of youth. The nine stories all feature a young
female protagonist. These young women fight to determine their own truth within the worlds of their relatives and elders, who appear as peripheral guiding hands rather than narrative catalysts. “Orringer’s greatest asset is her ability to translate the intricacies of the female psyche to the page; whether the story is apparently about religion, sex, love, death, or illness, ultimately it concerns the human emotions, especially those found deep within the female heart.” —Library Journal

Critics / Reviews

“These are wonderful stories. There is a headlong narrative energy in Julie Orringer’s stories
that I find quite remarkable, and it is combined with a tremendous intelligence about the behavior of children and adolescents.”
—Charles Baxter

“Smooth, assured storytelling. Julie Orringer’s swift, intricate evocation of individual worlds
gives depth and integrity to her stories.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Tough, beautiful…piercing and true. In How to Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer delves into the complex lives of girls and young women, and with uncommon courage and exceptional clarity she shows us what she finds: passionate, often disturbing feelings of longing and jealousy and grief; an intense struggle to make sense of the unfathomable world of adults, and above all a determination to survive. These are tough, beautiful stories, piercing and true, and they mark the debut of an exceptionally gifted writer.”
—Ann Packer

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