Puchner is a short story writer whose stories have been published in Zoetrope: All Story, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, Best New American Voices, and many others.
His short story collection is called Music Through the Floor, "a hauntingly beautiful collection of stories recounted by a diverse group of similarly alienated heroes and heroines."
He is the winner of various awards including the Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
His first novel is entitled Model Home.
Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 80s.But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for each other—the “slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville” they share at home—Warren, his wife Camille, and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites. Worst of all, Warren has squandered the family’s money on a failing real estate venture.
When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to one of the houses in Warren’s abandoned development in the middle of the desert. Marooned in a less-than-model home, each must reckon with what’s led them there and who’s to blame—and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold them together. Subtly ambitious, brimming with the humor and unpredictability of life, Model Home delivers penetrating insights into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect, from a writer “uncannily in tune with the heartbreak and absurdity of domestic life.”
You can read an excerpt of Model Home at Five Chapters. Have you heard about 5C? Five Chapters publishes a short story in five parts each week.
Have you read any of his stories?
