In between diaper changes, Julie answered 20 questions exclusively for readers. Now, Julie is working on two new chapters from her home in Brooklyn-researching a new novel and mothering her 2-week-old baby boy. Dealing with themes of young women in a moment of difficult transition, it was a San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times Best Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book. Today, her first short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, is required reading for all Stanford University freshmen. Other acceptances followed, and so did a Stegner Fellowship in the creative writing program at Stanford University. A graduate of Cornell and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Julie found herself in San Francisco, working a series of less than desirable jobs and amassing 'a fat folder of rejection letters' until that wonderful day when her story 'What We Save' was accepted at The Yale Review. Her long list of illustrious awards would make even a seasoned writer blush-two Yale Review Editors' Prizes for best story of the year, the Paris Review Discovery Prize, the Cohen Award for Best Fiction, a National Magazine Award and two Pushcart Prizes-and her eagerly anticipated novel The Invisible Bridge was selected by Amazon as the Best Book of the Month for May 2010.īut there had to be days when she wasn't confident that all that editing would pay off. Filled with scribbles, notes and edit after edit, Julie Orringer has an uncanny ability to rewrite a story until it's just right.

Her writing notebooks tell the tale of a directed, yet inquisitive mind.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer