News

One of the best books of the year.

Orringer’s engaging wit, her eye for social detail, her ear for patterns of speech and thought, and her insights into human nature proclaim her a writer to be reckoned with.

Beautiful, so wise and vital. . . . It’s impossible not to feel for the pained and alienated young women in Orringer’s stories, and impossible not to be stunned and moved by their quests for redemption. More so than any debut author in recent years, Orringer proves that the kids are all right, even when they’re not.

Pure gems, rollicking along with scintillating prose and surety. Just when you think they will stop — and lesser writers would stop — they keep going with inexorable momentum.

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.

How to Breathe Underwater is unbelievably good: the humiliations and cruelties and passions of childhood, sparkling fresh prose, a writer with a big heart and an acute sense of the small things that loom large in our lives.

The harsh landscape in which Orringer’s characters dwell corresponds to the fierce beauty of her writing. Even the grimmest of these stories conveys, along with anguish, a child’s spark of mystery and wonder.

Fair Warning: Once you start reading Julie Orringer’s debut collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, you may find yourself unable to stop. . . . Orringer’s work has a glorious maturity and burnished grace. . . . Each story delivers the satisfying details and emotional heft of a novel.

Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories — wise, compassionate and haunting.

Wondrous. . . . Not one of her stories leaves you unaffected; often, your heart aches from sustained and painful empathy. And yet you’re left exhilarated, too, by their sheer energetic artistry. . . . [Orringer] seems to remember childhood events as if it were last week. All her stories have unexpected settings and events, yet ring so true you practically feel you’re there somewhere yourself, sitting unobserved in the landscape observing your struggling fellow humans.

The world of the nine stories in this astonishing debut collection is one of beauty and longing….[These stories] are astounding in their ability to capture young people in all their simple agonies and joys.

This is a wonderful set of stories, full of empathy and wisdom.

Absolutely magnificent…In Orringer’s world, we are forced to remember that time in our lives when we had to tolerate mystery and meaningless, because, to the child in each of us, the world is still a murky — and potentially magical place.

A fiercely beautiful debut….Orringer delves into the harrowing rip tides of emotion and circumstance that disturb lives yet enhance survival. Her tales are tough, transcendent and so richly imagined you won’t want to get out.

Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.