Julie Orringer

Julie Orringer (born June 12, 1973), is an American writer and lecturer. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize, among others.

Career

Julie Orringer received her BA in English from Cornell University and her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches Fiction at Brooklyn College and the Stanford University Stanford in New York Program. In the past she has also taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, NYU, University of Michigan, St. Mary's College, California College of the Arts, and Stanford University.

Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

She received the Paris Review's Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, The Yale Review Editors' Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the Anne and Robert Cowan Award from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was the recipient of a 2004–5 NEA grant for The Invisible Bridge. The novel is based on the experiences of her family in the Holocaust and World War 2, including her grand-uncle Alfred Tibor, who later became a well-known sculptor.

Literary works

• How to Breathe Underwater: Stories. Alfred A. Knopf. 2003. ISBN 978-1-4000-4111-4. How to Breathe Underwater contains nine short stories, many of them about characters submerged by loss, whether of parents or lovers or a viable relationship to the world in general. In "Pilgrims," a band of motherless children torment each other on Thanksgiving day. In "The Isabel Fish," the sole survivor of a drowning accident takes up scuba diving. In "When She is Old and I am Famous," a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones," the failure of religious and moral codes—to protect, to comfort, to offer solace—is seen through the eyes of a group of Orthodox Jewish adolescents discovering the irresistible power of their sexuality. How to Breathe Underwater is a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Northern California Book Award.
• The Invisible Bridge. Alfred A. Knopf. 2010. ISBN 978-1-4000-4116-9. julie orringer. Julie Orringer's first novel, long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. The Invisible Bridge is the story of a young Hungarian-Jewish student who leaves Budapest in 1937 to study architecture in Paris. There he meets and falls in love with a ballet teacher. The student and ballet teacher are then caught up in the second world war with their families and struggle to survive.
• The Flight Portfolio. Alfred A. Knopf. 2019. ISBN 9780307959409. The Flight Portfolio is a novel based on the true story of Varian Fry, an American journalist who, in 1940, went to occupied Europe to help rescue Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust.

Translations

French

• Comment respirer sous l'eau, 2005

German

• Unter Wasser atmen, 2005
• Die unsichtbare Brücke, 2011, ISBN 978-3-462-04300-6

Italian

• Quando ho imparato a respirare sott'acqua, 2004, ISBN 88-7684-792-8

Dutch

• Ademhalen onder water, 2004
• De onzichtbare brug, 2010, Template:ISBN 978-90-446-0431-3

Japanese

• How to Breathe Underwater, 2006

Hungarian

• Láthatatlan Híd, 2011, ISBN 978-963-310-060-8

Spanish

• El Puente Invisible, 2010.

Portuguese

• A Ponte Invisível, 2012.

Hebrew

• הגשר הנסתר The Invisible Bridge, 2012.

Swedish

• Den osynliga bron, 2012.

Forthcoming translations:

• Norwegian

External links

• Official site
• ANDREW ERVIN (May 28, 2010). "When Europe Wept". The New York Times.
• "Birnbaum v. Julie Orringer". The Morning News. October 22, 2003.