Robin McLean
Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her debut collection Reptile House won the BOA Editions Fiction Prize in 2013. The collection was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Prize in 2011 and 2012. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Western Humanities Review and has appeared numerous journals including The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Common, Malahat Review and Nashville Review. A figure skater first—having learned to skate and walk at the same time—McLean believes crashing on ice prepared her for writing fiction. She teaches at Clark University and splits her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire and a 200-year-old farm in western Massachusetts, helping with the haunted in the corn maze each fall. www.robinmclean.net.
Works
Reptile House
Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize.
Robin McLean's award-winning debut short story collection Reptile House is inhabited by killers and thieves, astronauts, moose hunters and country club ladies, all seeking some way out, some new door to imagined happiness.
The characters in these nine stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, wait decades for lovers, derail their lives with desires and delusions. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? McLean's stories probe the underbelly of human behavior, revealing the darker motivations behind the chilling interactions she breathes to life. The stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.
Awards and Recognition
- BOA Short Fiction Prize
- Finalist Flannery O'Connor Short Story Prize 2011 and 2012
Website
Location
Bristol, NH
Author Contact
Category
Fiction & Literature