The New Yorker

FINALIST—ASME AWARD FOR FICTION

One of the most widely read short stories of the year, certainly the most discussed, “Cat Person” is about—what? Text messaging? A bad date? Unwanted sex between a younger woman and an older man? In a conversation with the New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, Kristen Roupenian offered her own explanation: “The story was inspired by a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online.… The incident got me thinking about the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks.” But that, as the online reaction showed, was only the beginning. Roupenian’s first collection of short stories, You Know You Want This, is scheduled for publication in 2019. As for The New Yorker, the award judges said the publication of “Cat Person” placed the magazine “on the cutting edge of storytelling.”