DEER & Other Stories is a luminous debut fiction collection that burns darkly.  The deer that populate these 11 stories, whether real deer or imagined, made of skin and blood and bone, used as plastic lawn ornaments, even a wire stage prop, pad in and out of the character’s lives as mirror-images reflecting all the beauty, splendor and fear both species engender.

• In The Grass Eye a boy is sent to live at his grandparents’ crumbling Italian villa after his mother has a breakdown, where he meets a German boy he suspects of being a Nazi.
• Within You Without You tells the story of a woman who had once been part of an entourage that traveled to India with the Beatles.
• A psychiatrist in Help, battling his obsession with a former patient, mythologizes her into strange incarnations.
• On leave from Vietnam, a soldier in Remember Hardy is tormented by visions of deer starving over the Long Island winter.

Tepper is one of the most original voices in fiction I’ve heard in quite a while… I was reminded of the first time I read Denis Johnson. Yes, she’s that good. This is a writer to watch!—Jamie Cat Callan, The Writer’s Toolbox

Susan Tepper, who has had jobs as an actress, tour guide, flight attendant, singer and rescue worker, has written a collection of short stories as quirky as her life so far. “Deer & Other Stories” seems to be autobiographical…and the Deer in the title appears as a kind of leitmotif…suddenly darting into your path, to haunt the story.— Saul Friedman, NEWSDAY

Susan Tepper creates brilliant, quirky, unpredictable worlds in her story collection DEER… her characters, brimming as they are with eccentricities, never let us forget how deeply human they are at their core. — Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America

The stories in DEER are terrific, many remind me of Hemingway’s “In Our Time”: the woods, the war, the indirection... —Robert Viscusi, Astoria (American Book Award)

Susan Tepper notices more detail at breakfast than most of us do all day, and her stories brim with surprise thanks to her characters’ immersion in what it means to live.
—Mark Wisniewski, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman

Tepper takes the simplest little plots and electrocutes you with them.—Hugh Fox, poet & playwright

AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE    ISBN 978 0 578 02479 0