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Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths—joyful, whimsical, even absurd—through the world.

A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left.

In the worlds Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.

About the Author

Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, now lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024-25 Washington, DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction. Her writing has appeared as a spotlighted story in The Best Small Fictions, as well as in The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Lauren works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is her debut collection.

About the Moderator

Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers, a finalist for the 2019 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award in short fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in journals such as The Southampton Review, World Literature Today, Puerto Del Sol, The Baltimore Review, Passages North, Southern Humanities Review, and Washington Square Review. He is a professor at George Mason University, co-editor of Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature, and co-organizer of the Fox City Lit reading series.