Adults and Other Children

“An ‘acute portrayal of failed relationships and struggles to transcend social norms,’”―New York Times Book Review (editor’s choice)

“Readers can detect deadpan realism influences of Lorrie Moore and the feminism of Angela Carter in these stories, but the work is distinctly and originally Cohen’s voice. . . . [The] plots and these characters will stay for a while. Make room for them.”―PopMatters

“These shockingly insightful stories, riddled with breathtaking observation, are also, frequently, laugh out loud funny. Wisdom and hilarity are such a gorgeous couple, and Miriam Cohen makes the absolute most of this pairing. Evocative of Lorrie Moore at her sharpest best, Cohen’s is still an entirely new and very welcome voice.”―Robin Black, author of Life Drawing and If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

“In Adults and Other Children, Miriam Cohen renders the minds of children with such vivid intensity and imagination that I couldn’t help but see our world anew. The stories take us on a journey of familiar terrain―a daughter coming to terms with her parents’ divorce, sisters about to lose their mother, a new boy in school―in an unfamiliar and unflinchingly honest way, allowing us to better understand the messy and complicated relationships of our lives. Absorbing, magical, sinister and yet surprisingly sweet, I’ll be thinking of these stories for a long time.”―Fatima Farheen Mirza

“In the weird and gorgeous tradition of Angela Carter and Kelly Link, Miriam Cohen has written a manifesto of postmodern womanhood. Her characters are hilariously neurotic, exquisitely self-diminishing, and yet grotesquely eloquent ― perverse poets all, wandering the streets of New York or suffocating in the decorated living rooms of suburbia, trying their dire best to navigate life’s labyrinths.”―Josh Gaylord, author of When We We’re Animals

“By stretching the misconceptions of children so thin and so wide, Miriam Cohen creates a glittering, transparent fabric through which we can finally read more clearly the myths that invent us.  Adults & Other Children reimagines the Bildungsroman, as childhoood clashes with adulthood to create a beautiful and terrifying emotional storm.  These stories will make you want to climb back into your past, and hold the child that you — for such a short time — belonged to.”―Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

“The girls and women who inhabit Miriam’s Cohen’s dazzling short story debut are like voyagers into the foreign land of their lives and families. These characters invent, observe, dismantle, fabricate, dissect, turn inside-out and, as a result,we, her delighted readers, are led into a funhouse where daily life is shrunk, stretched and reimagined so that we are left breathless and gratefully altered. As if that were not enough, Cohen is wicked funny, crafting sentences so surprising and alive you’ll gasp.”―Victoria Redel

“A chilling view of womanhood―made up of lies, secrets, and fear―expressed in elegant prose.”―Kirkus

“Lies, misconceptions and self-deception are at the heart of Miriam Cohen’s funny, scathing, and touching collection Adults and Other Children.”―Foreword (starred review)

Adults and Other Children follows four women as they navigate life from the confusion and innocence of childhood to the bizarre and darkly humorous complexities of adulthood. Along the way, we meet a vindictive, and imaginary, nanny, who casts doubts about the true identity of a little girl’s new baby sister; A group of friends who spend their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes; A college professor who has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault; and a Jewish woman who feigns ignorance in her religion, hoping to endear herself to an Orthodox widower. Time and again, the girls and women in this riveting debut collection fantasize and deceive to get what they want―or what they think they want―while we find ourselves drawn to their often surprising and all too human behavior.

Miriam Cohen’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Carve Magazine, Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Bennington Review, Joyland, Fugue, Hobart, Image and Witness. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Miriam lives in New York City.