Short stories by Eric Puchner
Besides Last Day on Earth, Eric Puchner is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and won a California Book Award. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015 he was awarded the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, given annually to writers “of proven excellence in poetry or prose.” An assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.
Listing 3 stories.
In a dystopian world where people stay young forever, a brother and sister encounter an old man for the first time, and must decide whether or not to turn him in.
In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.
After his father abandons him and his mother, leaving them with two hunting dogs, a teenage boy tries to save them from ending up in the shelter.