Eric Puchner
Encyclopedia
Life
His short stories have appeared in Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, and Best New American Voices. He was a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers' ConferenceBread Loaf Writers' Conference
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...
.
He attended Chadwick School
Chadwick School
Chadwick School is a nonsectarian independent K-12 day school located on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, California.-History:...
high school. He taught at San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
, and Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
He currently teaches at Claremont McKenna College
Claremont McKenna College
Claremont McKenna College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college and a member of the Claremont Colleges located in Claremont, California. The campus is located east of Downtown Los Angeles...
.
He lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their daughter.
Awards
- Pushcart Prize XXVIII
- Wallace Stegner Fellowship
- 2006 National Endowment for the Arts grant
- Music Through the Floor, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.
- PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Novel
- Model Home: A Novel, Simon and Schuster, 2010, ISBN 9780743270489
Anthologies
- Best new American voices 2005, John Kulka, Natalie Danford, Francine Prose (eds), Harcourt, 2004, ISBN 9780156028998
Reviews
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 (thus far) 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 (misfits forced to swim against life's current), 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.