Laura Furman
Laura Furman is an American author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Mirabella, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere'.
Furman was born in New York City and attended Hunter College High School and Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. In 1978, she moved to Houston, Texas. After living in Houston, Galveston, Dallas, and Lockhart she settled in Austin with her husband, Joel Warren Barna, and their son.
She has written four collections of stories The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, Drinking with the Cook, The Mother Who Stayed, two novels The Shadow Line and Tuxedo Park, and a memoir Ordinary Paradise.
From 2002 - 2019, she was the series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories, an annual collection published by Anchor Books. Furman selected the twenty winning stories.
She taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT, she founded the literary magazine American Short Fiction'', which was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.Awards
Books
- Drinking with the Cook
- Ordinary Paradise
- Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading
- Tuxedo Park
- Watch Time Fly
- The Shadow Line
- The Glass House
- The Mother Who Stayed: Stories
Short stories
- "How I Left New York," short story, "Subtropics".
- “The Boy Who Did What He Wanted,” short story, "Epoch".
- “The Blue Birds Come Today,” short story, "The American Scholar".
- “The Eye,” short story, "Yale Review", 119-134.
- “A Thousand Words,” short story, "Epoch" 52, 2 : 131-141.
- “Plum Creek,” "The American Scholar" 76, 2: 104-107.
- “Here It Was, November,” "Subtropics" 3: 106-23.
- “The Old Friend,”"Prairie Schooner" 80, 1 : 131-42.
- “The Thief,” "Antioch Review" 64, 3 : 538-549.
- “The Right Place for a Widow,” "Southwest Review" 88: 503-513.
- “Beautiful Baby,” "Yale Review" : 89-103.
- “Shards,” "Threepenny Review", 32-37.
- “Melville’s House,” "Southwest Review" 85 290-312.
- “The Apprentice,” "Ploughshares" 21: 135-150.
- “Hagalund,” "Southwest Review" 79 : 271-301.
- “The Secret Keeper,” "Southwest Review" 75 : 212-233.
- “Something Called San Francisco,” "Southwest Review" 72 : 168-181.
- “Tuxedo Park: Novel Excerpt,” "Cosmopolitan" 201 : 290-291, 342-45.
- “Sunny,” "The New Yorker" 60 : 29-34.
- “Buddy,” "The New Yorker" 60 : 42-49.
- “Nothing Like It,”"The New Yorker" 58 : 38-45.
- “Buried Treasure,” "The New Yorker" 56 : 27-33.
- “The Smallest Loss,”"The New Yorker" 56 : 44-52.
- “Circle Pin,” "University of Houston Forum" : 19-23.
- “Sweethearts,” "The New Yorker" 55 : 48-49.
- “Arlene,” "Vision" 2 : 45-48.
- “Shazam,” "Mississippi Review" 8 : 49-58.
- “For Scale,” "The New Yorker" 55 : 36-37.
- “Eldorado,” "Houston City Magazine" : 19-20 and 35.
- “Quiet With Belinda,” "Fiction" 5 : 63-74.
- “Listening To Married Friends,” "Mademoiselle" 84 : 70- 78.
- “Seesaw,” "Redbook" 148 : 134, 250-58.
- “Real Estate,” "The New Yorker" 53 : 28-32.
- “The Kindness of Strangers,” "The New Yorker" 53 : 34-39.
- “Free and Clear,” "The New Yorker" 53 : 28-32.
- “My Father’s Car,” "The New Yorker" 52 : 44-50.
- “Last Winter,” "The New Yorker" 52 : 29-36.
Editor
- Series Editor, The O.Henry Prize Stories, 2003—2019
- Co-editor, with Elinore Standard, ''Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading, 1997
