Lindsay Stern

Biography

Lindsay O’Connor Stern is an American novelist and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation examines representations of law in 20th century Anglophone and German literature and philosophy. She is the author of three works of fiction including Town of Shadows (Scrambler Books), about a mender of rugs living in a dictatorship, which was adapted into a dance. Her novel The Study of Animal Languages (Viking), an Amazon Editors’ pick, won a Lois Kahn Wallace Award and the Taylor-Chehak Prize from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her scholarship and shorter writing have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Smithsonian Magazine, and Law and Critique. She has received an Amy Award, a Watson Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Publications

“In Praise of Socks: The ‘Poetic’ in Wittgenstein,” New Literary History (2023 Ralph Cohen Prize, forthcoming in 2024)

“Own Yourself! Reflexive Possession and its Discontents in Morrison’s Beloved (1987),” Law and Critique (print issue forthcoming)

“The Divide,” Smithsonian Magazine (cover), July/August 2020, 32-49

The Study of Animal Languages (New York, NY: Penguin Random House: Penguin/Viking, 2019/2929) 

Lüz (Edmonds, WA: Ravenna Press, 2017)

Town of Shadows (Sacramento, CA: Scrambler Books, 2012)

“Cambodian Dictionary” in Triple Series No. 6 (Ravenna Press, 2017), p. 3-21

“History,” DIAGRAM 14.6 (2014)

“The Great Forgetting,” Fairy Tale Review, vol. 10 The Emerald Issue (2014), p. 131-132

“Eight Fictions,” The University of Louisville’s Miracle Monocle 8 (Spring 2016) 

“How to Age,” PANK Magazine 6.15 (2011)

Research Interests

Law and Literature; Media Studies; History of Science and Technology; Poetry; Wittgenstein

Education History

M.F.A. Iowa Writers’ Workshop

B.A. Amherst College, summa cum laude