Orringer is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She received the Paris Review's Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, The Yale Review Editors' Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the Anne and Robert Cowan Award from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was the recipient of a 2004-5 NEA grant for her current project, a novel set in Budapest and Paris before and during the Second World War. This novel, entitled The Invisible Bridge, was published by Knopf in May 2010.

• (2003) How to Breathe Underwater contains nine short stories, many of them about characters submerged by loss, whether of parents or lovers or a viable relationship to the world in general. In "Pilgrims," a band of motherless children torment each other on Thanksgiving day. In "The Isabel Fish," the sole survivor of a drowning accident takes up scuba diving. In "When She is Old and I am Famous," a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones," the failure of religious and moral codes...to protect, to comfort, to offer solace...is seen through the eyes of a group of Orthodox Jewish adolescents discovering the irresistible power of their sexuality. How to Breathe Underwater is a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Northern California Book Award.

• (2010) The Invisible Bridge is Julie Orringer's first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. It was published on May 4, 2010 by Knopf.

French

• Comment respirer sous l'eau, 2005

German

• Unter Wasser atmen, 2005

Italian

• Quando ho imparato a respirare sott'acqua, 2004, ISBN 88-7684-792-8

Dutch

• "Ademhalen onder water"

Japanese

• "How to Breathe Underwater," 2006

Forthcoming translations:

• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Spanish