Eric Puchner


Eric Puchner is an American novelist and short story writer.

Life

His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, and Best New American Voices. He was a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His story, "Beautiful Monsters", was selected by Tom Perrotta for the 2012 edition of The Best American Short Stories.
He attended Chadwick School high school. He taught at San Francisco State University, Stanford University, and Claremont McKenna College.
He currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
He lives in Baltimore with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their daughter, Tess, and son, Clem.

Awards

Sorry, Chekhov and Hemingway. You'd think the golden age of the short story would be now, given our increasingly short attention span. Alas, stories have almost entirely vanished from mainstream magazines, and collections are hardly first on most book publishers' lists. How exhilarating then to come across a young writer as technically gifted and emotionally insightful as Eric Puchner who is dedicated to the short form. The nine stories in his debut collection, Music Through the Floor, are told in a classical mode - not groundbreaking in terms of form or content, but executed with such fluency, constructed with such surprising plot twists and blessed with so many bright, memorable lines that they rise above the contemporary din.