Short stories by Emma Cline
Emma Cline is the author of The Girls and the winner of the Plimpton Prize. Her story collection Daddy was published in 2020. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critic's Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta and Tin House. Her stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories in 2017, 2018, and 2020, and were anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. In 2019, Cline’s story, “What Can You Do With A General,” was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Story Prize.
Listing 6 stories.
When a young man moves in with his pregnant girlfriend's family in the Pacific Northwest, he feels increasingly trapped by his girlfriend's secrets, her brother's drunken behavior, and the demanding land on the family's orchard.
A woman works retail and worries about how to make it as an actress in LA. To remedy her social and financial problems, she bonds with a teenage co-worker and dabbles in sex work, despite her nagging concerns.
A bitter divorcee and distant father having an affair with a younger, married woman gets a call that his son has gotten into trouble at boarding school. He travels to the school, where the headmaster says his son, who beat up another student, must transfer. In a series of events that makes him increasingly bitter, he ends up making his son's girlfriend cry in a restaurant.
A young man is working at a hotel resort during quarantine-era Covid. When a quirky couple comes to stay, his service to them makes him reconsider why he’s making the lifestyle choices he is and what the point is of self-restraint.
In the wake of her controversial affair with a married celebrity, a young woman struggles to process the memories of their illicit relationship and the overwhelming aftermath.
When a man's children return home to visit him and and his wife for Christmas, he reflects on their tense family dynamic, his past aggressive and abusive behavior, and his distance from his eldest daughter, who has found a new family with her boyfriend and his child.