Winner of the 2025 Louisville Review National Poetry Prize
Deborah Schupack's fourth book, When We Were Gun, occupies a narrative space between poetry and prose and a psychic space between everyday and end-of-the-world. The twenty narrative poems are told in a "Greek chorus" of parent voices as they wait outside the scene of a school shooting, forging a remarkable chronicle of the ordinary exigency of parenting.
Written while the world was still in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, Relentless tells the capacious and compelling story of one of America’s leading health care systems mobilizing across science, medicine and the human experience to battle the greatest health care challenge in living memory.
Praise for The Boy on the Bus (Free Press)
“Schupack’s debut novel is at once familiar and eerie, like discovering a bird fluttering recklessly about your living room...a chillingly twisty psychological drama about love and need—one that turns on itself as seamlessly as an elegant Escher.” —Entertainment Weekly
“This is my favorite book this year—an incredible page-turning idea, written with grace, style, and deep, true emotion.” —James Patterson, best-selling author
“Motherhood with all its contradictions has rarely been shown so nakedly. . . . From beginning to end, nothing is ordinary, while at the same time everything is.” —The New York Times Book Review
Praise for Sylvan Street (Plume/Penguin)
“The page-turning pace never flags . . . Teeming with plot twists and social unrest, Schupack shows with poignant prose and commendable plotting the good, the bad, and the ugly that money brings out in people.” —Publishers Weekly
“In this fascinating, sly novel, Deborah Schupack applies the bright scalpel of her prose to … [show] us that even a sweet village on the banks of the Hudson can be, too, one of the dark places of the earth.” — Kathryn Davis, author of Silk Road
“A work of pure magic about money, class, and the daily deceptions among friends and neighbors, husbands and wives.” — Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women