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Winner of the 2023 Rising Writer Prize, Half-Lives is a playful debut short story collection imagining women’s lives in a world free of social limitations.
Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s collection is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Lively and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply.
The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives: A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide
"Schmeidler’s entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women’s bodies and sexuality. . . . Schmeidler’s offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre." —Publishers Weekly
". . . a stunning debut by an author who is unafraid to write evocatively, experimentally, and with a raw vulnerability that will inevitably stir contemplation and conversation. Challenging stigmas and the silence which surround issues of women’s autonomy, as well as their mental and physical health, Schmeidler has crafted sixteen stories that speak to the deepest (and at times uncomfortable) truths about what it means to walk through this world as a woman." —The Masters Review
". . . Schmeidler’s tales stick. Just as 'half-lives are never over,' these stories are charged with a nuclear energy, thrumming with a tensile power that may or may not be deadly." —Necessary Fiction
"The terrain of marriage, motherhood, aging, and other core female experiences is revealed afresh in this short story collection from Hudson Valley resident Schmeidler, whose gift for bending the constraints of reality into pretzels is matched only by the precision-tuned prose that transports us into her premise." —Chronogram
"Lynn Schmeidler’s Half-Lives is an extraordinary debut, an endlessly smart, endlessly cool, endlessly moving collection full of evocative desire and wonder." —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed