Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, was published in November by FSG and Random House Canada. Shelly’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, fivechapters, and Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading among other places, and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Fellowship in Bulgaria, and LMCC’s Workspace grant. A MacDowell Fellow in 2012 and 2014, Shelly holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village, and teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she also co-directs the Writers’ Forum.

“Shelly Oria’s sparkling stories of busted love, tentative lust, and international identity can come at you in pieces: they can be structured in fragments, numbered like lists, broken up like a dotted line. Inevitably, though, they reassemble by the time she’s done with them, which ensures that you won’t be done with them for a while—they’ll stay with you, gently insistent, pressing on your mind from all directions.” —Ben Greenman, author of The Slippage and Mo’ Meta Blues 

“Shelly Oria’s acutely feelingful stories about the beautifully confusing love lives of the post-gender generation are wonderworks of candor and grace. In warm, intimate voices, Ms. Oria’s narrators—young, wisdom-rich, often bicontinental—struggle winningly with longing and loss. If you want to know how the new human heart feels and sounds right this very instant, this is the only book you’ll need.” —Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way

Lee Matthew Goldberg graduated with an MFA from the New School.  He is a regular contributor to The Montreal Review and The Adirondack Review. His fiction has also appeared in Essays & Fictions, The New Plains Review, Orion headless, Verdad Magazine, BlazeVOX, and on Amazon. He has co-founded a monthly reading series called The Guerrilla Lit Fiction Series (guerrillalit.wordpress.com). His debut novel SLOW DOWN is a neo-noir thriller that will be published by New Pulp Press in January 2015. Follow him at leematthewgoldberg.com.

“Lee Matthew Goldberg writes like a young Bret Easton Ellis doing a line of uncut Denis Johnson off the back of a public urinal. Memorable in the best possible way, also mostly illegal, Goldberg’s SLOW DOWN is a mad man’s tour of Manhattan’s vices, follies, and ultimate betrayals. It should come as a guidebook, or more likely--a warning for all the up and comers out there trying to cut a few corners, as well as a few throats, to get ahead. An impressive debut.” - Urban Waite, author of The Terror of Living and Sometimes the Wolf.

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