Nora Lange, author of Day Care and Us Fools, with Erin Beeghly

Nora Lange, author of Us Fools (2024), discusses her new collection of short stories, Day Care, with Erin Beeghly (Department of Philosophy). Their conversation touches on female desire, motherhood, mischief, and the strange pressures of contemporary life. They discuss the surreal charge of stories like “Hot Spot,” the autofictional elements of the title story, and Lange’s “careening” prose style, which moves through play, surprise, and sudden transformation without losing emotional depth. Along the way, they talk about siblings, marriage, daycare, deadlines, and the elastic feeling of time in parenting, as well as Lange’s interest in genre, from realism to the snow-globe science fiction of “Dog Star.”  Episode art: Detail from Joris Hoefnagel, Seven Snails (c.1575/1590s), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.  Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.