Half-Lives
Winner of the 2023 Rising Writer Prize, Half-Lives is a playful debut short story collection imagining women’s lives in a world free of social limitations.
Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s collection is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Lively and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply.
The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives: A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide
Lynn Schmeidler’s is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In addition to her short story collection Half-Lives, she has published one poetry book, History of Gone (Veliz Books, shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and finalist for the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize), and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines (Grayson Books, Finalist for the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize and the Comstock Review Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Prize) and Curiouser & Curiouser (Winner of the Grayson Books Chapbook Prize). She earned a BA from Yale University and an MEd from Lesley College. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
