What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming Americans, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today. In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many—an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others—can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope. "I've always believed that as a short story writer Peter LaSalle has been in the same class as Donald Barthelme and Joyce Carol Oates in the avant-garde of American fiction writers, and now, reading his new collection, What I Found Out About Her, I am more than confirmed in that belief: indeed, his sophisticated and highly controlled formal experimentation, which is the sparkling core of his style, now flows with such masterly ease that he can be said to be in a class of his own, at the forefront of American creators of original prose." —Zulfikar Ghose, author of The Triple Mirror of the Self "Peter LaSalle’s stories, set in wonderfully various settings—Buenos Aires, New York, Paris, Chicago—are rich in their delineation of our private lives and loves, and in those moments in which, by ourselves or with others, we live most deeply. These haunting tales are shrewdly original, disarmingly complex, and—always, always, since LaSalle is one of our finest storytellers—as beautifully crafted as they are memorable.” —Jay Neugeboren, author of You Are My Heart and Other Stories
Author
LaSalle graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1969, and the University of Chicago with an M.A. in 1972. His fiction has appeared in magazines and journals such as AGNI, Antioch Review, Paris Review, Tin House, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and others. His essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Worldview, Commonweal, The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Times, and others. His work has been included in over 20 anthologies. He has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a resident faculty member at the Michener Center for Writers, since 1980, and has held the title of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English since 2001. Before that, he taught at Johnson State College in Vermont (1974-76), Iowa State University (1977-80), and was a visiting faculty member with Harvard University Summer School from 1985-1997. His awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Tell Borges If You See Him, the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction for What I Found Out About Her, the The Antioch Review Award for Distinguished Prose, an O. Henry Award (1991), and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
