about

Alyssa Pelish writes, teaches, and edits in New York. Her essays, articles, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review online, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Smart Set, The Quarterly Conversation, Science,  3 Quarks Daily, The Denver Quarterly, Identity Theory, the New England Review, Cabinet. Conjunctions, North American Review, Fence, and The Baffler.  Her work has also been featured at LitHub, the Granta blog, and elsewhere. Her story “The Pathetic Fallacy” was chosen as a distinguished short story by The Best American Short Stories 2018, and her essays “The Problem with Being a Final Girl” and “Something in the Woods: On Distance, Knowledge, and Enchantment” were recognized by The Best American Essays 2021 and 2022. Her story collection House, Tree, about miscommunication and disconnect, was a finalist for the 2022 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.

Right now, she’s at work on a story collection about con artists, witting and unwitting.

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“I’ll bet you write wonderful letters.”*  alyssa.pelish[at]gmail.com

*Spencer Tracy’s Mr. Sumner to Katharine Hepburn’s Bunny Watson (Desk Set, 1957)

I’m also not entirely against being followed: @ape_lish.