Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundations list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.
The Maltese Version (2026) Katy Simpson Smith "Katy Simpson Smith playfully turns the Mediterranean psychological thriller on its head with this lush, finely textured, riveting dive into lives tangled by language and time. The Maltese Version is irresistible."
The Slip (2025) Lucas Schaefer "Quite simply, The Slip is everything an epic novel should be, everything you want an epic novel to be: symphonic, expansive, irresistibly engrossing, utterly unpredictable. It is immense in ambition, bursting with language, dauntless in scope and imagination; an ode to the infinite crossroads of life that lead each soul to its present moment. That this is a debut staggers me."
The Unwanted (2025) Boris Fishman "The Unwanted is a tightrope of a novel: tense, precise, stunning in its scope and power, unnerving in the flashes of familiarity that burst through its inventions."
The Bandit Queens (2023) Parini Shroff "Parini Shroff captures the complexity of female friendship with acuity, wit, and a certain kind of magic irreverence, turning on a dime from humor to horror, horror to heart, and then back again, exhilarating her reader until the very last line. Tender, unpredictable, brimming with laugh-out-loud moments, The Bandit Queens heralds a prodigious and sophisticated literary talent."
The Great Mistake (2021) Jonathan Lee "Few writers working today have Jonathan Lee's range or eye for detail. Fewer still are capable of roaming minds and histories with such bittersweet, richly detailed ease, or taking on with such profound depth all the messy, hilarious, heartbreaking humanity of a person, and a time, and indeed an entire city. The Great Mistake is a wonder and a delight."
The Lightness (2020) Emily Temple "A darkly funny, luminously drawn mystery that hits bullseye after bullseye of language and emotion. The Lightness is a book I didn't know I needed."
The Mere Wife (2018) Maria Dahvana Headley "With a sharp eye and a deft flourish, Maria Dahvana Headley reimagines one of our oldest stories to give us a chilling, elemental vision of our latest selves. The Mere Wife is a bold, stunning riptide of a book."
West (2018) Carys Davies "West proves what in-the-know lovers of her short stories have already been trumpeting: Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary, a master of the form. In West, she breaks open our fascination with fated journeys and the irrepressible draw of the unknown, imbuing the American landscape with her own rare magic, twisting the heart as few others can, brilliantly navigating the tension between narrative minimalism and imaginative opulence."
The Unseen World (2016) Liz Moore "A staggeringly beautiful meditation on love, legacy and the emotional necessities that make life worth living."
Get in Trouble (2014) Kelly Link "With Get in Trouble, Kelly Link continues to prove just how much of a literary tightrope walker she really is. Her prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that each one is like a firework in the brain. You work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories."
