Outer Stars, Kirsten’s fourth story collection, won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize and will publish with University of North Texas Press in November of 2025.

“Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is a master storyteller, and Outer Stars is a mesmerizing, deeply felt collection about the necessity of human connection and the acceptance of those things we can’t change.” -Andrew Porter, author ofThe Imagined Life

“In her haunting and beautiful story collection Outer Stars, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum explores isolation and grief—grief for lost love and children, grief for the life never lived but mourned nonetheless, grief for a changing planet. Her language is elegant, elegiac, prescient, perfectly crafted for the task of describing unbearable losses—both losses behind us and those yet to come. This collection demonstrates why I read everything this author writes.” - Lori Ostlund, author of Are You Happy?

Pre-order the collection here.

* Outer Stars’s beautiful cover image uses a painting by the artist Adam Fung. For more on his work, please see his website.

Order the novel: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147867/elita/

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island of Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

Praise:

"Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.” —KirkusReviews (starred review)

"I devoured this novel, held sway by its expert construction and luminous prose, and am haunted still by the wise and impossible questions that simmer under its breathless plot and within its indelible characters. Elita belongs on a shelf among the great literary page-turners of our time.”—Melissa Febos, author of Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

"An unforgettable book that will haunt you, as it did me, long after you set it down.”—Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want

"Brimming with sharp wit and tender observations, Elita strikes a superb balance between scientific scrutiny and the depth of human emotions. Lunstrum's prose surprises us with its taut, keenly observed beauty, delving into the precarity of women in a society where control works behind the facade of civility"—Kristen Millares Young, author of Subduction

"Bernadette, a child development specialist and single mother, is tasked with teaching a nonverbal teenage girl—found alone on an island that houses a prison—to speak. Everything about the girl is shrouded in mystery: her origins, even her age. As Bernadette digs deeper, the questions only multiply. Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum charts the slow-burn relationship between these two unforgettable characters with a luminous sensitivity. Elita is a brooding, atmospheric tour de force of psychological suspense."—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

What We Do With the Wreckage won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press and was published by UGA Press in 2018. Read more about the collection and the O'Connor Award here. 

"The stories in Kirsten Lunstrum's new collection, Swimming with Strangers, are smart, harrowing, dramatic, and quite often surprising. In one, the narrator describes the story of her own birth; in another, as the characters discuss fairy tales—one of the characters forces his students to read the Brothers Grimm in their brutal, original forms—the roles of witch and distressed damsel switch back and forth. While we could easily imagine stories like these in which thematic elements take over, Lunstrum keeps them at a low burble, focusing on the reality of these characters’ struggles. It is a very brave choice." (Fiction Writers Review)

Swimming With Strangers, Chronicle Books 2008. Stories from this collection were honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a long listing in the Best American Short Stories series, and a Pushcart nomination. 

"Kirsten Lunstrum's stories are gem stones, multi-faceted, highly polished, more and more complicated the closer you look." (Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness)

This Life She's Chosen, Chronicle Books, 2005. Selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers title.