My short story “Hot Spot” is published in the New Yorker Summer Fiction Flash Series. It’s part of my forthcoming collection, Day Care.

"Lange's prose is smart and surprising, invigoratingly icy and delicious."
—Joy Williams, author of Concerning the Future of Souls

"Read more than a couple of these slippery gems, and you run the risk of calling up friends and even strangers and saying, Hey, don't hang up—listen to this...!"
—Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Same Bed, Different Dreams

"In these stories that are insightful, deliciously weird, and often laugh-out-loud funny, Lange reminds us that life, real life, is a kind of delirium. Day Care has made me greedy; now I want to see more of the world, more of our beautiful batshit existence, through Nora Lange's lens."
—Maggie Smith, bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

"Lange is unwilling, uninterested, and unsympathetic to storytelling that traffics in the maudlin, mundane, or murky. The stories of Day Care are brutal, hilarious, and relentless; they are pedal to the metal, which is to say: divine and not a little bit insane.”
—Hannah Pittard, author of If You Love It, Let It Kill You

From award-winning author Nora Lange comes a ransacking of the house of motherhood and matrimony.

Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the “Great American Novel” by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by.

In “Heart Beats,” Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of “messy socializing” with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a “kinky sort of game” while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In “Island of Phaetons,” an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with “the husband” and “the friend who wanted more than friendship” to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece “with news” for her daughter, a tantalizing invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In “Dog Star,” two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex.

These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage. Day Care is a biting reflection on economic precarity, love, and peeing your pants.