A01=Lauren D. Woods
Author_Lauren D. Woods
Category=FQ
Category=FS
Category=FYB
child
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
fantastical
fantasy
mother
motherhood
playful
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9781637681091
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 04 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Autumn House Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters' Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction
Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIE Award for Short Stories
Featured on The Millions’ Great Fall 2025 Book Preview
Featured in Electric Lit's "15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Winter"
Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths—joyful, whimsical, even absurd—through the world.
A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left. In the worlds Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.
Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, now lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024 Washington, DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction. Her first book, The Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, won the 2024 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize and her writing has appeared in the top ten spotlighted stories in The Best Small Fictions, as well as The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Lauren works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig.
