MARY ROBISON was born in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the 2018 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is the author of four novels and four story collections. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

The Dictionary in the Laundry Chute

An Amateur's Guide to the Night
The Wellman Twins

Coach

You Know Charles
I Am Twenty-one
Smart

Yours

Falling Away

In Jewel

The Nature of Almost Everything

Nothing's It

Look at Me Go

"Mary Robison's short stories are short, subtle, and substantial . . . Her ironic sense of detail bursts from every sentence." --Vogue

An Amateur's Guide to the Night stands as a perfect example of Mary Robison's beloved narrative style: purposeful, clipped, and devastating in its restraint. Reflecting on the life of disaffected youth, these stories speculate on how they often manage to remain deferent towards the rest of society--and document how spectacularly they often fail.

"These thirteen stories are glimpses from a moving train into lit parlors, dinettes, bedrooms and dens . . . Think of Robison as the engineer, blowing the whistle, calling the stops and starts; invisible when you want to ask her why we're stalled here in the middle of nowhere, between stations, jobs, relationships and decisions." --Los Angeles Times