The Great Grown-Up Game of Make Believe, Lauren Woods’ debut short story collection, won the Autumn House Fiction Prize in 2024, judged by Kristen Arnett. Its stories confront broken relationships, divorce, parenting, and an all-encompassing desire for escape. A woman grieving the end of her marriage gives birth to a ravenous spider. A young father works a dead-end call center job while waiting for the mother of his child to return home to him. A mother discovers that housework makes her shrink terribly small. And a child on a drive with her family remembers a secret known only to her mother and herself. 

In the twenty stories that make up The Great Grownup Game of Make-Believe, mothers, fathers, children seek to escape the painful realities of their lives by playing with the truth or attempting to become someone else. Childhood memories linger into adulthood, and individual worlds of longing unfold. In stories laced with lyric prose, sadness is sprinkled with joy, whimsy, and absurdity. Blending the real and the fantastical, the characters in these stories explore loneliness, heartbreak, parenting, and an ever-present yearning to live on their own terms.