The Animal Room
By Lauren Acampora
Grove Press, June 9, 2026
Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from award-winning author Lauren Acampora.
Tensions simmer in small-town Connecticut. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong?
As in Acampora’s debut The Wonder Garden, The Animal Room delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers, and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on human nature. Through its riveting ensemble, The Animal Room paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary American life that is strikingly unique.
Selected Praise
Praise for The Wonder Garden:
“Like Wharton, Acampora seems to understand fiction as a kind of elegant design. As characters reappear in one story after another, Acampora reveals herself as a careful architect… [The Wonder Garden] accomplishes great depth of characterization, in no small part because Acampora doesn’t shy from the unpalatable… There is a barbed honesty to the stories that brushes up against Acampora’s lovely prose to interesting effect. Often a single sentence twists sinuously, charged with positive and negative electricity.” —New York Times Book Review
“Acampora is a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs… [The Wonder Garden] is reminiscent of John Cheever in its anatomizing of suburban ennui and of Ann Beattie in its bemused dissection of a colorful cast of eccentrics. But Acampora’s is entirely her own book… Acampora’s ability to lay bare the heartaches of complex individuals within an utterly unique imaginative world is worthy of high praise.”
—The Boston Globe
“In 13 sharply drawn linked stories, Acampora reveals the complexities beneath the polish and privilege of a prosperous Connecticut town.”—People
“Acampora’s stories show that an Anna Karenina principle still applies: …Add well-drawn characters, interesting plots, cultural zingers and dead-on critiques of consumerism and Acampora delivers a page-turner.” —Dallas Morning News
Praise for The Hundred Waters
“Questions of the pursuit of art, stagnation, youth and aging, and how to exist on a planet that is, increasingly, made up solely of emergencies, are grounded in the richness (no pun intended) of Sylvie’s and Louisa’s characters. And, as in The Paper Wasp, Acampora’s descriptions of the strangeness of artworks are not to be missed.” —Literary Hub, Best Summer Reads
“A thrilling drama… As Gabriel draws both Louisa and Sylvie into his thrall, their lush small town stops feeling quite so staid.” —Vogue
“An intense anthropological look at the suburbs, desire, and the secrets people keep.” —WBUR, 5 Books to Cozy Up With This Fall
“In the tradition of territory-marking novelists John Cheever and John Updike, Lauren Acampora expertly captures deep-pocketed suburban restlessness in The Hundred Waters… Through its delicate narrative circuitry and roving point of view, the novel gradually exposes a community that’s in crisis without even knowing it.”
—Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“In this tightly paced novel that echoes Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher (2017), and A. Natasha Joukovsky’s The Portrait of a Mirror (2021), Acampora sets the idealism of youth against middle-age complacency and high-society reservations… With this gem of a novel, Acampora cements herself as a thrilling voice in fiction.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Arresting… Acampora achieves a sharp and tense depiction of an illusory and stultifying haven.” —Publishers Weekly
“Acampora weaves a tale of artistic ambition, climate activism, and the seductive allure of extravagant wealth. Told in the author’s signature lush prose… [T]his is an enchanting pool worth sticking your toe into.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Acampora has] a fluid writing style and a plot that moves along quickly… Absorbing… Excellent.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Praise for The Paper Wasp
“Take The Talented Mr. Ripley, cross it with Suspiria, add a dash of La La Land and mix it all at midnight and this arty psychological stalker novel is what might result.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A hypnotic tale of codependence that skewers our fascination with gossip and fame.” —O Magazine, “The Best Books by Women of Summer 2019”
“The Paper Wasp fixes its gaze on one magnetic and increasingly twisted friendship… [H]ypnotic and sensual… Acampora’s prose has a seductive, pearlescent allure.”
—TIME
“Acampora’s kaleidoscopic narrative shifts fluidly from Abby’s strange, shimmering images to Elise’s descent into tabloid erasure, artfully tracking the unexpected power shift between them.” —BBC.com
“This is the Los Angeles of weird cults and day-drunk stars, of struggling documentary filmmakers and mysterious but powerful directors… Utterly bizarre and completely bewitching, this twisted, delicious tale will grab you from the first page and hurl you over the edge.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Acampora’s linked short story collection, The Wonder Garden, electrified literary critics, and this deeply disturbing, wildly inventive, and completely unpredictable debut novel is sure to do the same. Abby and Elise will be haunting readers’ dreams long after the last page.” —Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author
Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp, and The Hundred Waters. Her work has won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review, One Story, New England Review, Missouri Review, Guernica, and The New York Times. The story “Dominion,” from The Animal Room, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2025.
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