I mean, ‘Astonish Me’ has a complex structure, but I wrote it – from the start to selling it – in five months.” I think too I was just spoiled by my first two books because I wrote them so quickly. She says that, for her, writing short stories are “curiosity-driven,” a kind of laboratory for her imagination to investigate character or setting. If anything unites the stories, it’s that they are concerned with the personal intrigues of the characters’ lives. The story “Acknowledgements” was the last one she finished, in 2017.

Shipstead wrote “Cowboy Tango,” the first of the 10 stories in the collection, in her second year of grad school 14 years ago when she was just 24. Mostly, though, if you’ve loved Shipstead’s deft writing, her keen eye for human frailty that’s been evident in her other books – which include “Seating Arrangements” and “Astonish Me” – you’ll recognize the same mastery in “You Have a Friend in 10A.”īut while the story collection arrives after the bestseller success of “Great Circle” – a Noteworthy book pick of 2021 by the Southern California News Group, among other honors – it’s actually a compilation of work that precedes the epic novel. Related: Want more stories about authors and bestsellers? Get the free Book Pages newsletterĪnd “You Have a Friend in 10A,” which hits bookstores May 17, contains other echoes of “Great Circle,” too, if only in the sense that these stories also cover multiple geographies – from Malibu to Montana and the misty Irish hills to a remote Eastern Europe village. In this case, a character, the former actress in the collection’s title story, proves to be the forerunner for the floundering celebrity Hadley in “Great Circle.” Careful readers will also recognize the novel’s therapist character, the one who tells her Hollywood clientele to “imagine a tiger” to vanquish their insecurities. Not the Cadbury chocolate kind of Easter egg, mind you, but the kind that’s a hidden reference to other work. Readers of Maggie Shipstead’s novel “Great Circle” will pick up her new short story collection, “You Have a Friend in 10A,” and delight in the Easter egg found in its pages.

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