Julie Orringer

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Julie Orringer (born June 12, 1973), is an American author born in Miami, Florida. Her first book, How to Breathe Underwater, was published in September 2003 by Knopf Publishing Group.

[edit] Overview

Orringer is the Helen Hertzog Zell Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She received the Paris Review's Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, The Yale Review Editors' Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the Anne and Robert Cowan Award from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was the recipient of a 2004-5 NEA grant for her current project, a novel set in Budapest and Paris before and during the Second World War.

[edit] Literary Works

(2003) How to Breathe Underwater contains nine short stories, many of them about characters submerged by loss, whether of parents or lovers or a viable relationship to the world in general. In "Pilgrims," a band of motherless children torment each other on Thanksgiving day. In "The Isabel Fish," the sole survivor of a drowning accident takes up scuba diving. In "When She is Old and I am Famous," a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones," the failure of religious and moral codes--to protect, to comfort, to offer solace--is seen through the eyes of a group of Orthodox Jewish adolescents discovering the irresistible power of their sexuality.

How to Breathe Underwater is a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Northern California Book Award.