About the Book

Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Playful 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.

Praise for Half-Lives

Featured in Electric Lit‘s “The Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collections of 2024”
Lynn Schmeidler’s “InventEd” won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Prize, selected by Jonathan Lethem 

Schmeidler’s stories have a touch of the gruesome and absurd, but the currents that run through the collection are longing, desire, and outrage. Each story has a different narrator, but there emerges a collective voice for women in different times, points of life, and indeed, material planes. . . .  A wild and original collection.
—Electric Literature

Schmeidler’s entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women’s bodies and sexuality. . . .  Schmeidler’s offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre.
—Publishers Weekly

. . . a stunning debut by an author who is unafraid to write evocatively, experimentally, and with a raw vulnerability that will inevitably stir contemplation and conversation. Challenging stigmas and the silence which surround issues of women’s autonomy, as well as their mental and physical health, Schmeidler has crafted sixteen stories that speak to the deepest (and at times uncomfortable) truths about what it means to walk through this world as a woman.
—The Masters Review

. . . Schmeidler’s tales stick. Just as “half-lives are never over,” these stories are charged with a nuclear energy, thrumming with a tensile power that may or may not be deadly.
—Necessary Fiction 

Half-Lives is often experimental and occasionally fairy-tale-like, but the dark woods in these stories may be women’s bodies. Or perhaps they are our current political landscape, with its overturned landmark laws and pronatalism (though not referenced, it’s what’s really scary here, and can’t help but lurk in the back of your mind as you read). Many of these tales, after all, dare to center women who choose not to be mothers. The conflict between motherhood and art is, in fact, a recurring and vital element in many of them, and there’s not a trad mom in sight.
—Southern Review of Book

The terrain of marriage, motherhood, aging and other core female experiences is revealed afresh in this short story collection from Hudson Valley resident Schmeidler, whose gift for bending the constraints of reality into pretzels is matched only by the precision-tuned prose that transports us into her premise.
—Chronogram

Lynn Schmeidler’s Half-Lives is an extraordinary debut, an endlessly smart, endlessly cool, endlessly moving collection full of evocative desire and wonder. Schmeidler has a gift for hooky, high-concept openings, plus the chops to deliver on those promises in ways you might not see coming. I’ve rarely been so consistently surprised by a short story writer; I can’t wait to reread these stories and be amazed all over again.
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

Reading Half-Lives is as thrilling and strange as finding Franz Kafka in a patch picking blueberries for Donald Barthelme and Shirley Jackson. I laughed out loud one thousand times. I don’t know how she did it, but Schmeidler has taken the world off its hinges and hung it back on brilliantly askew. These slanted stories swing wildly, and the breeze their swinging makes is a relief we now desperately need.
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily

Half-Lives is not a half depiction of anything, but rather a full and delightfully teeming portrait of women’s lives as they grow up and grow older. Schmeidler’s got a wonderful sense of rhythm—here time races by, here it slows down to a glorious drip—and her stories contain gymnastic feats—back handsprings of language and structural contortions. I admired and enjoyed this playful and profound collection.
—Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League

Among a great number of extraordinary submissions to this contest, Lynn Schmeidler’s “InventEd” was the one I found myself circling back to again and again. . . . The story balances an insouciant warmth and humor against a vertiginous glimpse into the mysteries of solipsism, longing, and the risk of dissolving the self in intersubjective desire. Plus, it’s goofy.
—Jonathan Lethem, 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest Judge

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Lynn Schmeidler is a fiction writer and poet. She is the author of the story collection Half-Lives (winner of the Rising Writers Prize for Fiction, Autumn House Press), the poetry collection, 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 […]

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