SHELLY ORIA is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. Recently she coauthored a digital novella, CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Oria lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she codirects the Writer’s Forum at the Pratt Institute and has a private practice as a life and creativity coach. Her website is www.shellyoria.com.

UBLISHING a book, especially your first book, is an experience that can mess with your head—regardless of how your book “does” in the world. When my first book, a collection of short stories titled , was published in November 2014, many people in my life assumed I’d enter a state of total bliss. And to some extent I assumed the same. A decade earlier, I’d moved to New York City from Tel Aviv, where I grew up, and started translating my work from Hebrew in the hopes of getting into an MFA program. Every step along the way felt hard-earned: learning how to write fiction in my second language, graduating, getting my first few stories published, signing with an agent. So why I be blissed out that it all came to fruition, that Farrar, Straus and Giroux was publishing my book? And I was, or part of me