Work samples

  • Girls of a Certain Age (Short Story Collection) & How to be Eaten (Novel)
    Girls of a Certain Age (Short Story Collection) & How to be Eaten (Novel)
    GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE (Feb 2021, Little Brown) is a darkly funny short story collection exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.

About Maria

Baltimore City

Maria Adelmann is the author of GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE (Feb 2021, Little, Brown), a "fearless, darkly playful debut exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness." Her debut novel HOW TO BE EATEN (Feb 2022, Little, Brown) reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. She has previously been a finalist for the Baker Artist Award in Literary Arts, won an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts… more

Girls of a Certain Age: Stories

GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE (Feb 2021, Little Brown) is a darkly funny short story collection exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.

What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?

Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.

Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.

(text from jacket copy)

  • Girls of a Certain Age
    Girls of a Certain Age
    Girls of a Certain Age (Little Brown, 2021)

How to be Eaten (a novel)

HOW TO BE EATEN (2022, Little, Brown) reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. Little Red Riding Hood, all grown up, is frequently in crisis and self-destructive, ostensibly reenacting the terrible traumatic thrill of being digested by a wolf. Gretel is wary of kindness, rarely eats, and reluctantly dates. Bluebeard’s Girlfriend, as she’s called in the tabloids, grapples with the fact that she fell in love with a serial-killing tech bro billionaire. Ashlee, the most recent winner of a certain reality TV show dating show, is grappling with life after getting a "villain edit."

Ultimately, HOW TO BE EATEN is a novel not just about trauma, but about how stories are consumed and who gets consumed by them. It’s about women finding their voices. It’s a ripe theme for fairy tales, which have long been viewed as tales told by women for children, and have been written off as a non-serious, domestic art. But here are the women, with all of the power and humor and insight they posses, grappling with their pasts and deciding for themselves how to move on into the future.

  • How to Be Eaten.jpeg
    How to Be Eaten.jpeg
  • Tin House, Spring 2018
    Tin House, Spring 2018
    Excerpts from the novel appeared in Tin House.

Other Publications

My fiction, essays, and humor pieces have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Threepenny Reviw, the Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, the book MFA vs. NYC, and many other places. 

  • Literary Magazine Publications
    Literary Magazine Publications
    My fiction has appeared in many literary magazines.
  • MFA vs. NYC, published by n+1
    MFA vs. NYC, published by n+1
    “Basket Weaving 101"was included in n+1’s book MFA VS. NYC (February 2014). My piece garnered special mentions in THE NEW YORK TIMES, OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY, and BOOK RIOT, among other outlets.