News: How To Breathe Underwater

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.

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.

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

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.

Utterly authentic . . . the passage through childhood and puberty is strewn with dangers and roadblocks. But what [Orringer] does with those hazards in her stories is something altogether magical.

Eloquent….Orringer sifts the inexorable sparks of sexual awakening and unearths moments of brittle surprise and bitter triumph…Haunting.

Unclouded by sentimentality….Orringer endows her situations and her characters — adults as well as children — with complexity and humor….She writes with penetrating intelligence and remarkable self-possession.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How to Breathe Underwater is an outstanding collection. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about — youth, friendship, death, grief, etc. — but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So while her themes are as solid and recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before. . . .The moment I finished it I bought myself a first edition, and then another. It’s that sort of book.

A major new talent…How to Breathe Underwater is a dark and beautiful book.