We're hosting award-winning author Lauren Acampora on Friday, August 14th to talk about her new book The Animal Room.

As in Acampora’s debut, The Wonder Garden, THE ANIMAL ROOM delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury, Connecticut and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers, and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on humanity.

Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from Acampora. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong?

Through its riveting ensemble, THE ANIMAL ROOM paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary American life that is strikingly unique.

Praise for THE ANIMAL ROOM:

“Transcendent. In this dazzling panoply of intersecting lives and stories, Acampora explores our relationship to the animal in all its forms and throws into profound relief our great and tragic humanity. A marvelous feat of imagination and empathy.” —Mona Awad, author of Bunny

“The Animal Room is an epic novel cut into sections and scattered along a trail for readers to gather up. It appears initially to be a collection of stories about the connections between humans and animals. Each story, however, proves to be part of an intricately-realized overstory of remarkable scope and depth. Every life, every being, from the rescue dog to its rescuers, proves to be interrelated in ways only the writer, and the reader, are able to see. It’s a stunning accomplishment.” —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

“Piercing and unsettling, the stories in The Animal Room stalk through small-town Connecticut—the wild pressing against fences and windows, the feral lurking beneath the neighborly. With precision and dark wit, Acampora exposes a community where class tensions and primal instincts coil in uneasy proximity: the civilized veneer has always been thin here, and something is scratching at it from both sides. These sentences are tensile and gleaming—Acampora is a major talent.” —Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

“Like Wharton, Acampora seems to understand fiction as a kind of elegant design…a single sentence twists sinuously, charged with positive and negative electricity.” —New York Times Book Review, on The Wonder Garden

Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp, and The Hundred Waters. Her work has won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, One Story, New England Review, Missouri Review, Guernica, Story, and The Common. The story “Dominion,” from The Animal Room, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2025.