My short story collection - FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES - was published in June 2007 by MacAdam/Cage , and they will publish my first novel - SPEEDING IN THE DRIVEWAY - in 2008.
Some of my stories are live at Mississippi Review , Spork , and on Narrative Magazine . Other pieces can be found in McSweeney's 14 & 16, CROWD Magazine, Night Train, Quick Fiction, The Drama Magazine, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, MonkeyBicycle, Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Swivel, Opium 1 and 3, and in two anthologies: Stories From The Blue Moon Cafe V: A Cast of Characters (Editor, Sonny Brewer; Publication date: August 2006), and W. W. Norton's Anthology, NEW SUDDEN FICTION: SHORT-SHORT STORIES FROM AMERICA AND BEYOND (Editors, Robert Shapard and James Thomas; Publication date: January 2007).
Nice Things Being Said About Famous Fathers & Other Stories:Pia Z. Ehrhardt's Famous Fathers is a stunning first collection. The stories charm and tease and threaten with equal fervor. Ehrhardt's narrators are always a little bit in heat, open to love's every fleeting attention and intent on having and being pleasured by their moments of grace or disgrace. From "Running the Room," in which a daughter helps her mother with a little spirited indiscretion, to a breathtaking moment in "How It Floods" when a father's attentions to his daughter linger at the edge of incest, these are stories that tempt the heart like no others. To read them is to be seduced, at night and in the slanting rain, in a new city, over quiet water, by the woman of your dreams.
--Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe and Elroy NightsPia Ehrhardt’s tender and funny stories are filled with passionate women just barely bottled up by their everyday responsibilities: busy-hearted wives and mothers who may find themselves surprised by love or their own resiliency but who never doubted for a moment the intensity of their desire to touch the world. They experience their lives as tunnels to negotiate before the payoff of so much space. They render for us that jumping-on-a-trampoline feeling, when our most intimate connections are the top of the bounce, and the view up there is both scary and sweet.
--Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected StoriesPia Z's stories will break your heart in the best way imaginable. I actually gasped aloud several times while reading this astonishing collection--it's that brave, that funny, that shocking, that good.
--Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by WolvesPia Ehrhardt's compassion for the sorrows of love springs from a sensuous heart and a mind quickened to truth. Her stories travel the road of desire, with a generosity of wit that makes a reader eager, a bit breathless, and in the end grateful for the journey.
--Tom Jenks, editor, Narrative Magazine