Babies

by Ann Packer

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection   Virginia, a copywriter at an ad agency, looks around her office one day and realizes that everyone—well, nearly everyone—is pregnant.  Can she be happy for them?  “Babies,” included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series in 1992, is a sharply funny and perfectly observed story of pregnancy, city living, the semantic contradiction of “creative directors,” and finding one’s place in the world. A selection from Ann Packer’s luminous first collection Mendocino and Other Stories.  An eBook short.

33 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2015

About the author

In addition to her upcoming novel Some Bright Nowhere, Ann Packer is the author of three bestselling novels: The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has been published in two collections — Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me — and includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Ann’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published around the world.

Ann was born in Stanford, California, and grew up near Stanford University, where her parents were professors. She attended Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1995 she returned to the Bay Area, where she raised her children and lived for many years. Now, along with her husband, the novelist and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias, she divides her time among New York, the Bay Area, and Maine.