The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe

Description

Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

Finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIE Award for Short Stories

Featured on The Millions‘ Great Fall 2025 Book Preview

Featured in Electric Lit‘s “15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Winter”

Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths–joyful, whimsical, even absurd–through the world.

A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left.

In the worlds Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Lauren D. Woods
Published: 10/21/2025
Publisher: Autumn House Press
ISBN: 9781637681091
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 0.90″ H x 8.40″ L x 5.50″ W

About the Author
Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, now lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024 Washington, DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction. Her first book, The Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, won the 2024 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize and her writing has appeared in the top ten spotlighted stories in The Best Small Fictions, as well as The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Lauren works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig.