Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Laura Adamczyk, author of Hardly Children a collection of short stories, and her first book, published by FSG Originals in November.

Laura was born, raised and lives in Illinois. Her writing has appeared in The Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, Washington Square Review and many other periodicals and collections. She earned her MFA in friction from the University of Illinois.


Hardly Children is an eerie and frankly scary collection of stories that loosely but thematically, both with children and without, weave a skein of thrill, loss, dread, Kafkaesque ,seemingly meaningless, until you think about it afterword, stories of life bereft of hope, confusing but somehow transcendent.

You come away from this book, learning something about yourself, whether you like it or not and finding out that you haven’t been given the key to the story, but rather an unanswered question or a void where you expect a period or an exclamation mark.

In all, I have never read anything like it and was upset when I read the last page. I even dreamed the book. Sometimes when I fell asleep with the book on my chest. But I do that a lot since I’m old.

Anyway, with that, welcome Laura and thanks so much for joining us today.