“A surprising, edgy, and original writer.” Jayne Anne Phillips, Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize
- Finalist, Kirkus Indie Books Award (“Literary Fiction” Category)
- Finalist, Eric Hoffer Award
“Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.” Kirkus Reviews
This collection gathers slice-of-life vignettes that explore the complex and often untidy nature of emotion, with plots that range from mundane encounters to more dramatic events.
“The Quiet Car,” in which a woman on a routine Amtrak ride loses her cool at her fellow passengers after receiving bad news, is followed by “Student Shooter,” in which a playwriting professor who longs to have a child becomes close to a disturbed student. Searle’s focus on conflicting emotions is especially evident in “When You Watch Me,” the story of Evvy, a 17-year-old in 1980s Arizona. She becomes infatuated with her summer college course professor, Barry; when she loses her virginity to Barry in his pool, his wife hides nearby and takes photos. Later, the wife mails the pictures to a now-adult Evvy. Though she was exploited, Evvy also derives a complicated sense of power from the experience.
The titular story, “The Drama Room,” compellingly explores similar themes: In the 1980s, when PJ is a techie for her school’s drama department, the director, Ms. L., begins an inappropriate relationship with the show’s teenage star, Freddy. PJ—like most of Searle’s characters—takes the path of least resistance, laughing it off, only to regret the choice later. The Covid-19 pandemic is a motif that recurs throughout the work. “The Mask of the Red Death” follows a Massachusetts high school senior during the quarantine lockdown. Not taking the pandemic seriously, she spends spring break in Florida with friends. When she returns home, she is diagnosed with Covid-19; after unwittingly spreading the virus to her grandfather, she is isolated by her grief and depression. This story illustrates Searle’s ability to deftly capture a youthful voice in her prose: “They all stopped talking to you…when they asked you not to mention Grandad…Which you (coward that you are) didn’t wind up doing anyways, not wanting to get known as Arlington’s Typhoid-Whoever.” (From Kirkus)
Praise for The Drama Room
“A surprising, edgy, and original writer” Jayne Anne Phillips, Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize
“Searle’s short stories delve into the emotional messiness of the human experience. Daring plots with evocative prose and complex characters.” Kirkus
“These phenomenal stories in The Drama Room did me in… Brilliant, scathing, moving, unsettling, funny.” Caroline Leavitt for “A Mighty Blaze”
“Fearless exploration… The story ‘the Quiet Car’ lingers long after the train trip is over.” Kai Maristed, Arts Fuse (“Recommended Book of 2025”)
“Politics, sexuality, fertility, gender identity, mass shootings are just a few of the edgy topics explored in The Drama Room. A skilled screenwriter, co-author of the feature film “I’ll Show You Mine,” Searle knows how to turn up the heat.” Nadja Maril (“Recommended Book, April 2026”)
“Time to stop scrolling and start reading, because whatever is in your phone is better addressed in the pages of Elizabeth Searle’s The Drama Room: A Collection in Three Acts. Searle’s edgy, yet compassionate stories often pull from the day’s news but their touchstones go deeper into American culture. She anchors narratives atop American classics as varied Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the musical The Fantasticks. Across her celebrated career, her ongoing genius is in fore-fronting the culture’s present sickness. What is out there — pandemic contagion, predatory men, mass shooters, politically retrograde thinkers — might be … in here, inside the family, the school building, the work place, the bedroom. Fast-paced and entertaining, Searle’s stories offer high drama, but also a clear sense of what it is like to have an anxious brain and an aware body in a world heaving with turmoil.” Debra Spark (Author of Discipline and Unknown Caller)
“In The Drama Room: A Collection in Three Acts, Elizabeth Searle, novelist (We Got Him) and scriptwriter (I’ll Show You Mine), offers 12 high-stakes stories that probe contemporary maladies from the physical (the Covid epidemic), to cultural (reality hunger, infidelity, school shootings, loneliness, and hi-tech mass communications), to spiritual (materialism, celebrity, identity), and focuses primarily, but not entirely, on vulnerable teenagers, male and female. Searle is more compassionate than censorious, more Salingeresque than scathing (think of Nathaniel West or Flannery O’Conner). She is adventurous in exploring points of view, voices, and streams of consciousness; suggestive with symbolism; deft in managing perspectives in time, And her endings are genuine, visionary break-throughs.” Dewitt Henry (Author of Top Cop Kills and Founding Editor of Ploughshares)
“Elizabeth Searle’s The Drama Room: A Collection in Three Acts holds a deadly serious fun house mirror up to American society, magnifying its political distortions, skewed mores, sexual anxieties and the haunting effects of aging, medical diagnoses and hapless, ill-timed personal decisions. Searle’s dramatic instincts are fearless, scathing and often comedic; her dialogue is a master class in brilliance. In her libretto, ‘Tonya & Nancy: the Opera,’ based on public quotes, Elizabeth Searle has taken a bizarre, notorious incident in American women’s figure skating history, and made of it a lethally funny commentary on the graceless maneuvers of fear and ambition, on the media as Greek chorus, on how to demonstrate, with the rapier slice of a skater’s blade, Simone Weil’s conviction that the only question worth asking is ‘Why am I being harmed?’” Melissa Pritchard (Author of The Odditorium and Flight of the Wild Swan)
“The accomplishment of Elizabeth Searle’s work is that it feels contemporary and timely and relevant but never merely topical or trendy; her formal experimentation in story after story is a powerful reflection of our disequlibirum.” David Shields (Author of Reality Hunger)
“Lust, violence, love and grief—if there is an edge, Elizabeth Searle will push it and if there is a pulse, she will put her finger right on it. The stories in her latest collection, The Drama Room, showcase an enormous range in awareness and understanding of the human condition and the author’s skillful gift to surprise and deliver.” Jill McCorkle (Author of Life After Life and Old Crimes)