New Book Alert! Out now in the US and UK: FLOAT UP, SING DOWN (stories).

‘lyrical…revelatory…an ecology of elusive connection and meaning.’ The New York Times review

‘…the apparently placid setting disguises a deep reservoir of feeling and lets Mr. Hunt enlarge on his depiction of haunted ordinariness.’ The Wall Street Journal review

‘Brimming with easy-going charm, there’s real heart and hurt here, too, as Hunt unspools the hopes and dreams of his beguiling characters… An absolute delight.’ The Daily Mail review

‘Hunt has mastered a style that feels both traditional and fresh.’
The Financial Times review

‘his focal range may be purposefully tight, but the stories in Float Up, Sing Down are compassionate and universal.’ 
The Times Literary Supplement review 

‘…residents of an Indiana farming community in 1982 go about their routines, with secrets and regrets roiling beneath the surface. “Things grew where they grew and flew where they flew and that was all there was to it,” thinks one character. It’s an assessment that infuses these deeply felt tales.

The Christian Science Monitor review

‘If it is first-hand experience that gives his stories such authenticity, it is his literary skills that shape them so seamlessly into such an entertaining and rewarding collection.’
Irish Examiner review

'I loved this beautifully expressed, cleverly constructed, empathetic and insightful book. I’d be surprised if Elizabeth Strout’s many fans didn’t love it, too.’

A life in Books review

 ‘a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.’
Fantastic Fiction review

‘Fans of Hunt’s previous small-town studies will appreciate these lovingly drawn portraits’
Publisher’s Weekly review

‘An entertaining work of exceptional vitality.’
Kirkus review

‘While the stories work as stand-alone pieces, they also form a beautiful whole. This is a loving portrait of small-town Middle America that resonates well beyond its borders’
Library Journal

‘the book provides an elegy for a lost generation, or maybe for all the elders still here, as overlooked as the Midwest itself’
Los Angeles Times review

Born in Singapore in 1968 to American parents, Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. A 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, he is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction and translations have appeared in many literary journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Bomb and Zoetrope, in the United States and abroad. A former United Nations press officer who was raised in rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and spends his days with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, their daughter, Eva, and two cats.