CANR
WORK TITLE: HARDLY CHILDREN
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
http://lauraadamczyk.tumblr.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Knox College; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. A.V. Club, Chicago, IL, copyeditor.
AWARDS:Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award, for “Girls;” recipient of awards from awards from the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation of Chicago.
WRITINGS
Contributor to literary journals, including Guernica, Hobart, Chicago Reader, Pank, McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Necessary Fiction, and the Bellevue Literary Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Laura Adamczyk is a writer. After graduating from Knox College, she earned an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Adamczyk became a copyeditor with the A.V. Club in Chicago. Her short story, “Girls,” won the 2014 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award, which granted her a trip to Portugal and for her story to be published in Guernica. Adamczyk has additionally published works in a range of literary journals, including Hobart, Chicago Reader, Pank, McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Necessary Fiction, and the Bellevue Literary Review.
Adamczyk published her debut short story collection, Hardly Children, in 2018. The majority of the stories center on younger characters who struggle to communicate their needs as they navigate difficult situations. The stories range in themes. A young teacher worries about the increase of children that are being brought—perhaps kidnapped—to their small city. A graduate student refuses to settle into an uneventful relationship with a scholar and enters into a fling with an older long-haul truck driver. A young man hangs from the ceiling via hooks in his flesh for an art installation while pondering the notion that he was adopted. A young woman reverts to a childlike state after the death of her parents and spends her days living with her more mature, younger sister while reading children’s books. Another young woman writes messages using hair on the shower wall for her roommate-sister to read while dealing with the end of her marriage.
In an interview in Chicago Tribune Books, Adamczyk talked with Laura Pearson about her debut collection. In replying to Pearson about her ease at writing about intense topics, Adamczyk stated: “I feel like in the past few years I’ve been able to look at things more directly and speak about them more directly. It’s funny, because some characters in these stories are always angling from things and making a joke out of things when, I guess, living becomes too much for them to deal with.”
Booklist contributor Kristine Huntley stated: “Though occasionally veering into MFA pretension, Adamczyk’s confident, quirky first outing is bound to find admirers.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews reasoned that “despite the sometimes-frustrating mystery at the core of the stories, Adamczyk has a singular imagination and an often astonishing way with metaphor.” The same reviewer claimed that Hardly Children “heralds a promising talent.” A Publishers Weekly contributor opined that “Adamczyk never writes the same story twice, giving this collection a sleek and unnerving feel as readers” anticipate what will come next in the stories.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2018, Kristine Huntley, review of Hardly Children, p. 21.
Chicago Tribune Books, September 2, 2018, Laura Pearson, “Laura Adamczyk: Chicago Author’s Debut Collection, ‘Hardly Children,’ Shows Bold Promise.”
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2018, review of Hardly Children.
Publishers Weekly, September 10, 2018, review of Hardly Children, p. 48.
ONLINE
Laura Adamczyk website, http://lauraadamczyk.tumblr.com (November 11, 2018).
Laura Adamczyk’s fiction has won awards from the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation of Chicago and has appeared in Hobart, Chicago Reader, Pank, Salt Hill, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bellevue Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Her story “Girls,” published in Guernica, won the 2014 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award. She currently works at The A.V. Club in Chicago.
Laura Adamczyk: Chicago author's debut collection, 'Hardly Children,' shows bold promise
"Hardly Children" by Laura Adamczyk (FSG Originals)
Laura Pearson
Several stories in Laura Adamczyk’s forthcoming collection, “Hardly Children,” are, in fact, peopled with kids — or, as one character calls them, “smaller, more naive adults.” Others feature juvenile-acting grown-ups, and some, a disturbing lack of children — as in “Too Much a Child,” where kids deemed “bad” are ripped from their beds at night.
“There were far fewer children in the original iteration,” the Chicago-based writer said in a recent phone interview, “which is funny, because it seems like a such a big part of the book now. Turns out I have some preoccupations.”
A striking blend of graceful sentences and eerie premises — a man suspended from the ceiling of an art gallery, a woman scrawling messages with clumps of her own hair — make “Hardly Children” a no-brainer for the experimental imprint FSG Originals, which will publish the book Nov. 20. Adamczyk, who’s also a copy editor at The A.V. Club, spoke with the Tribune about her singular style and the (not-so-long) road to publication. Following is an edited Q&A.
Q: Has fiction always been your primary focus?
A: Pretty much. I got my MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But as an undergrad (at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.), I definitely got some (expletive) poetry under my belt!
Q: I was going to guess that you studied poetry, because your writing is lyrical and really beautiful.
A: Well, thank you. That’s good to hear. I definitely try to pay attention to the line-by-line language. But I don’t know how well I’d do in poetry if I tried to take it up these days. (Laughs.) I’d probably just end up with prose poems.
Q: How did this collection come together?
A: I’d say about half I wrote in grad school and half after. One of the stories, “Girls,” won the Disquiet Prize, and they send you to Portugal for a couple weeks and publish the story in Guernica. An editor reached out to me — it’s kind of a long story — and set me up with my current agent. We sent out (the manuscript) last summer, and FSG was one of the first publishers to respond. It was really surprising how it happened so quickly. I was anticipating a long wait and couldn’t believe it.
Q: In “Girls,” the narrator doesn’t totally trust her childhood memories. Is that something you’ve experienced too?
A: I think with strong memories from a young age, especially memories that feel really emotionally weighted, there’s often a warped or dreamlike (quality). You might not remember exactly how everything happened, but you can recall the feeling. I think it has to do with language. When you’re a kid, you don’t always have the words to describe something, let alone what it might have meant. Later on, you end up sculpting language around something that’s already very fluid and murky.
Q: These stories have guns, kidnappings, missing parents. Have you always been fearless in addressing more intense topics?
A: I don’t think it has always been true, but I feel like in the past few years I’ve been able to look at things more directly and speak about them more directly. It’s funny, because some characters in these stories are always angling from things and making a joke out of things when, I guess, living becomes too much for them to deal with.
Laura Pearson is a freelancer.
‘Hardly Children’
By Laura Adamczyk, FSG Originals, 240 pages, $15
Laura Adamczyk has won awards from the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation of Chicago and the Dzanc/DISQUIET International Literary Program. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Chicago Reader, Guernica, McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, and Salt Hill. FSG Originals will publish her short story collection, Hardly Children, in November 2018. She lives in Chicago.
Hardly Children
Kristine Huntley
Booklist. 115.4 (Oct. 15, 2018): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Hardly Children.
By Laura Adamczyk.
Nov. 2018. 240p. Farrar, paper, $15 (9780374167899).
Adamczyk's first collection revolves around youthful characters thrust into difficult situations and uncertain of how to move forward or adequately communicate their needs and desires. A graduate student resists falling into a tame relationship with a buttoned-up Lincoln scholar even as she enters into a dalliance with an older truck driver. In another story, a young man taking part in an art installation in which he hangs suspended from the ceiling is shocked to learn he's adopted. In a third tale, a young woman, the middle child in her family, resists growing up after the death of her parents, choosing instead to live with her ostensibly more mature younger sister and spend her days reading children's books. One story is shaped by Adamczyk's use of the rule that states that if a gun appears at the beginning of a story, it must be used by the end, a plot element that enables him to examine our society's fascination with weapons. Though occasionally veering into MFA pretension, Adamczyk's confident, quirky first outing is bound to find admirers in fans of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell.--Kristine Huntley
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Hardly Children." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2018, p. 21. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A559688064/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac4bae0d. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A559688064
Adamczyk, Laura: HARDLY CHILDREN
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Adamczyk, Laura HARDLY CHILDREN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $15.00 11, 20 ISBN: 978-0-374-16789-9
Children learn to navigate a treacherous world--and childish adults help create that treachery--in these stories from first-time author Adamczyk.
In an early story in this collection, "Too Much a Child," a young teacher lives in a city where children are being taken. No one is sure by whom or for what purpose: Something is happening here that is more sanctioned, and therefore, more sinister, than simple kidnappings. Tensions in the city are peaking, and demonstrations are breaking out with citizens demanding justice. On a bus, the teacher sits next to a small toddler and imagines kidnapping the little girl herself to keep her safe: "The desire of it was so plain, rising up, bursting out so fast, it was like something I'd spilled all over myself." These off-kilter desires propel many of the characters here. There is the young woman who tries to communicate with her older sister, grieving a lost marriage, by writing notes to her in hair on their shared shower wall ("Needless to Say"). A graduate student throws herself at a long-haul trucker when her Abraham Lincoln-scholar boyfriend proves too tame for her impetuous spirit ("Here Comes Your Man"). In the unforgettable "Girls," three young sisters whose parents are going through a divorce try to sate their curiosity about the contents of their grandmother's upper floor and encounter an unsettling figure there. Adamczyk clearly values symbolism and subtlety, which can leave readers with the feeling of looking at a photograph taken in the aftermath of a major action that has taken place just outside the frame. But despite the sometimes-frustrating mystery at the core of the stories, Adamczyk has a singular imagination and an often astonishing way with metaphor.
A challenging and unsettling collection that heralds a promising talent.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Adamczyk, Laura: HARDLY CHILDREN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553948986/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17d3e28d. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553948986
Hardly Children
Publishers Weekly. 265.37 (Sept. 10, 2018): p48+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Hardly Children
Laura Adamczyk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-16789-9
Adamczyk's accomplished debut collection pulses with an underlying sense of menace. The short opener, "Wanted," has a quiet depth that moves it away from what is traditionally thought of as flash fiction. The natrator is obsessed with children and may (or may not) have crossed over into predatory and/or pedophilic behavior. "Danny Girl" feels authentic to the young title character with its jumpy structure and present tense prose. There is a dark undercurrent in Danny's family that Danny doesn't understand en route to a shocking ending. "Black Box" starts pleasantly enough, on Christmas morning, with a father proudly showing his adult children his "infinity box." The strange twists in the story follow the father's accelerating addiction to his device. "Gun Control" works various disquieting riffs on the theatrical maxim "if there's a gun in act one, fire it in act three." Surrealism pervades "Wine is Mostly Water," in which a man performs for an art exhibit by being hooked through his skin to a ceiling 30 feet in the air--there's an affair and a psychological loss of identity, blurring with a physical loss of identity. Adamczyk never writes the same story twice, giving this collection a sleek and unnerving feel as readers know something bad is going to happen, but are uncertain of what it'll be. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hardly Children." Publishers Weekly, 10 Sept. 2018, p. 48+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A558979257/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26cdc662. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A558979257