Emily Fridlund Books in Order

Emily Fridlund grew up in Edina, Minnesota, and the landscapes of her home state stayed with her. Lakes, woods, cold weather, and the feeling of being both inside and outside a community run through her fiction. Those details matter because her stories are often about people who are close enough to watch everything, but not quite close enough to belong.

Before readers knew her for books, Fridlund spent years studying how fiction works. She earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. That long academic route shows up in her work, but not in a stiff way. Her stories are carefully built, yet they still feel intimate, odd, and lived in.

She was publishing short fiction in journals before the books arrived, and that story-writer pressure is still there on every page.

The turning point came during graduate school. The opening chapter of History of Wolves began as a short story in a fiction workshop at USC. Fridlund kept following the voice of Linda, a lonely teenage narrator in northern Minnesota, and that workshop piece slowly expanded into a novel. It is a useful clue to how she writes: she often starts with a voice, a troubling situation, or a setting that feels charged from the start.

When History of Wolves appeared in 2017, it quickly found readers. The novel follows Linda, who lives in the remains of a commune and drifts toward the secrets of a young family across the lake, where she works as a babysitter. Readers tend to remember the book for its wintry atmosphere, its moral unease, and the way it captures adolescence without sanding down the awkwardness, loneliness, or hunger to be seen. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.

It was a striking debut.

That same year, Fridlund published Catapult, a story collection that won the Mary McCarthy Prize. If History of Wolves shows what she can do over the length of a novel, Catapult shows how sharp she can be in shorter form. The stories move through families, friendships, marriages, childhood, and desire, often finding the moment when a small misunderstanding turns sad, funny, or quietly alarming. They can be eerie and tender at the same time.

Across both books, some patterns keep returning. Fridlund is drawn to outsiders, young people trying to read adult behavior, and adults whose convictions can turn harmful. She writes a lot about belief, secrecy, responsibility, and the gap between what people notice and what they actually do. Place matters too. Minnesota woods, lakes, classrooms, and houses are never just scenery in her fiction, they press on the characters and shape the choices available to them.

Her shorter work has appeared in journals including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, New Orleans Review, and Southwest Review. Alongside the fiction, she has built a parallel life as a teacher and scholar, with interests that include creative writing, narrative theory, the Gothic novel, and contemporary literature. That mix helps explain why her books can feel both carefully arranged and emotionally exposed.

These days, Fridlund teaches at Cornell University and lives in New York's Finger Lakes region. She still has a relatively small bibliography, which is part of the appeal. Each book feels deliberate. If you come to her for tense coming-of-age fiction, uneasy family dynamics, or stories that leave a little chill behind, you are in the right place.