Amie Barrodale

Amie Barrodale is an American writer and fiction editor of Vice. She is the author of the short story collection You Are Having a Good Time.

Literary career
Barrodale attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short story "William Wei" won The Paris Review Plimpton Prize.

Barrodale's debut short story collection, You Are Having a Good Time, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016.

The New York Times wrote: "All of the stories in this stark and cutting collection grapple with our failure to communicate, and investigate not merely the woeful inefficiency of language itself (although that's bad enough) but also the inherent impossibility of truly understanding another person's internal state. Barrodale has captured something near to what it feels like to be confined to a human brain." Bookforum called it an "icy, masterful first short-story collection," praising how "Barrodale elevates anecdotes into art."

The Rumpus panned the collection, arguing: "Barrodale intends You Are Having A Good Time to be ironic and comic. But the comedy is opaque, like the inside jokes at the hypothetical dinner party. The audience can only laugh if they identify." For Electric Literature, Barrodale's "characters' actions seem empty or methodical, devoid of purpose," and the book "is not an even collection, and as it progresses, it becomes more distant and difficult."

Carmen Maria Machado, writing for NPR, noted that the stories' conflicts are nothing new, but that "the old struggle is freshened by these characters' voices, and how they justify the low-grade, unyielding stubbornness of their desire to do what they are doing, consequences and reality be damned."

Publications

 * You Are Having a Good Time (FSG Originals, 2016)