Eric Puchner

His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, and Best New American Voices. He was a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His story, "Beautiful Monsters", was selected by Tom Perrotta for the 2012 edition of The Best American Short Stories.

He attended Chadwick School high school. He taught at San Francisco State University and Stanford University. He currently teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their daughter, Tess, and son, Clem.

• 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 978-0-7432-7048-9

Short Stories

Non-Fiction

Anthologies

• Best new American voices 2005, John Kulka, Natalie Danford, Francine Prose (eds), Harcourt, 2004, ISBN 978-0-15-602899-8

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.