Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of short fiction, Reasons To Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage.  Her Collected Stories, published in 2006, won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the REA Award. Erica Wagner, reviewing Hempel’s Collected Stories in The New York Times, described them as “eerie, unsettling, always original and perfectly expressed.  Each one sets itself off like a depth charge in the reader’s head…Hempel’s narrator’s are smart, damaged loners whose lives have a sense of being salvaged from a wreck.  The humor is mordant, rather than what is commonly called redemptive.”