How to Breathe Underwater » (Reprint)

Julie Orringer is making a splash with her breakthrough short story collection How to Breathe Underwater. Fellow author Ann Packer called it "the debut of an exceptionally gifted writer," and our Editors agree -- naming it as a finalist in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award program.

Nine brave, wise, and spellbinding stories make up this award-winning debut. In "When She is Old and I Am Famous" a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "Note to Sixth-Grade Self" a band of popular girls exert their social power over an awkward outcast. In "Isabel Fish" fourteen-year-old Maddy learns to scuba dive in order to mend her family after a terrible accident. Alive with the victories, humiliations, and tragedies of youth, How to Breathe Underwater illuminates this powerful territory with striking grace and intelligence.

The New York Times

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. — Lisa Dierbeck