Louis Harnett O’Meara:
Life Drawing & Other Stories



Ploughshares editor’s choice: “Shows honesty, humor, pathos, variety, and almost Jamesian shadings .” — DeWitt Henry
Forthcoming
fall 2026


A young man in Berlin finds the girl of his fantasies; an Irish peddler sells an old woman a picture of her own home; a librarian in Boston seeks the right gift for the man she admires. These five stories depict characters from different ages, places and backgrounds as they try to share their lives with others. They are studies of the quiet tragedies, cruel comedies and dubious loves of lives broadly and thinly lived.


Advance praise
Life Drawing & Other Stories is a splendid debut... These stories dramatize the turbulence of youth, saturated with pain and loss and confusion, and also hope. Together they have drawn a truthful picture of life. 
—HA JIN,  author of Waiting  (National Book Award)

An affecting and powerful quintet of stories, linked by a timeless, tragic theme: if you fail to take life seriously, if you live dishonestly, life will punish you, relentlessly.
—DAVID  SHIELDS, bestselling author of Reality Hunger

Harnett O’Meara traces the hollow places in his characters lives and presents them as evidence that our lives are drawn not just by the people who remain in them but also by those we leave behind.—CHLOE GARCIA ROBERTS, author of Fire Eaters
Pellucid sentences deepen every ambiguity in these tales of dubious love, walking the knife-edge of cruelty.
—MANDY-SUZANNE WONG, author of The Box
Selected fiction:
Life Drawing published in the inaugral issue of Duck alongside Jonathan Franzen, Andrea Cohen, Ottessa Moshfegh and others. 


Old Friends published as Featured Fiction in issue 30 of Arrowsmith Journal, available online. 
The Salesman published in Peripheries no. 6 alongside Alice Oswald, Victoria Chang, Tracy K. Smith and others.