His short stories have appeared in Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Missouri Review, and Best New American Voices. He was a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
He taught at San Francisco State University, and Claremont McKenna College.He currently teaches at Stanford University.
He lives in [[San Francisco]] with his wife, novelist [[Katharine Noel]], and their daughter.
Music Through the Floor, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.
Sorry, Chekhov and Hemingway. You'd think the golden age of the short story would be now, given our increasingly short attention span. Alas, stories have almost entirely vanished from mainstream magazines, and collections are hardly first on most book publishers' lists. How exhilarating then to come across a young writer as technically gifted and emotionally insightful as Eric Puchner who is (thus far) dedicated to the short form. The nine stories in his debut collection, Music Through the Floor, are told in a classical mode - not groundbreaking in terms of form or content (misfits forced to swim against life's current), but executed with such fluency, constructed with such surprising plot twists and blessed with so many bright, memorable lines that they rise above the contemporary din.