Flying Leap: Stories

These shocking, brilliant, and ultimately beautiful stories chronicle the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Each tale is laced with enough wit, humor, and imagination to keep the reader constantly amazed. From the young son persuaded to donate his heart to his dying mother, to the girl who befriends a man in a dog suit in post-apocolyptic suburbia, to the man and woman conducting a love affair across a park bench, these characters delight and dazzle.

"Both humorous and politically pointed, these often surreal stories are explicitly feminist and pro-working class. A yearning for human connection and a reverence for the offbeat makes them both entertaining and touching." Eleanor J. Bader, Library Journal

"Many of the short stories in Judy Udnitz's first collection feature such familiar middle-class American environs... that settling into them at first seems as cozy as relaxing in an old rocking chair — until this particular rocker begins to pitch sideways, spin wildly and blast off for parts unknown.... [A] consistently impressive debut." J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times Book Review

"Amazingly original...These unsettling short stories leave you wanting more." Seventeen

"Flying Leap is a tremendous debut — funny, dark, weird, adventurous, slanted, and enchanted." Newsweek

"Budnitz's humorous and original story ideas and the bold strokes with which she delineates them are the indispensable allies of her lyric intelligence.... An intriguing and mature debut." Rachel Cusk, The Village Voice

Judy Budnitz grew up in Atlanta and attended Harvard University. She was a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and received her MFA from New York University. Her stories have appeared in Story, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, and the anthology 25 and Under. She lives in New York City.