"Eric Puchner's Model Home is 1980s California in a nutshell: bright and frantic, giddy and broke, desperate and strong and always, always moving."
– Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs
Eric Puchner’s Music Through the Floor was one of the best-received story collections in years. His debut novel, a sweeping yet intimate story of the American dream in remission, viewed through the microscope of a single family, proves yet again just “how exhilarating it is to come across a young writer as technically gifted and emotionally insightful as Eric Puchner” (The New York Times Book Review)
The Zillers – Warren, Camille, and their three children – live the good life in a gated Southern California neighborhood, but the sun-bright veneer hides a starker reality. As Warren desperately tries to conceal a failing real estate venture, his family falls prey to secrets and misunderstandings, both hilarious and painful, that open fault lines in their intimacy. Their misguided attempts to recover their former closeness, or find it elsewhere, lead them into late-night burglary, improbably romance, and strange acts of betrayal. When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to one of the houses in Warren’s abandoned development in the desert. By turns tender and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Model Home is a masterful display of Eric Puchner’s prodigious gifts and penetrating insight – both into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect.
Eric Puchner’s short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, Best New American Voices, and many other journals and anthologies. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he is an assistant professor of literature at ClaremontMcKennaCollege. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their daughter.
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