Corpus Christi

A gorgeous, accomplished debut. - David Mitchell, The Independent (Books of the Year)

Stunning and complex… It’s hurricane country, and Johnston’s exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi’s own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory. - Los Angeles Times

Hard-eyed, life-affirming… These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, “every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy” (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last. - Boston Sunday Globe

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was described by David Mitchell as ‘a gorgeous, accomplished debut’, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Independent and the Irish Times, and the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of the Observer’s best Holiday Reads 2014.

His work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Paris Review, the Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation, and the winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2017.

Previously the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is now the Director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.