Audrey Lee

Utter Goodness (Farthest Heaven, 2026) is the debut full-length short story collection from Audrey Lee. You can purchase a copy here.

Thirteen short stories spanning the country—from East Coast to West, from New York City to backwater counties—await you in Utter Goodness. Beasts, birds, murder, muscles, Soviets, and swans sing in chorus: Audrey Lee’s characters face religion, love, and judgment in every state of the nation and in every state of grace.

“Utter Goodness nosily peers into strangers’ cars on I-95 and daydreams about the Americana bleakness of the Rust Belt… Each story experiments with form, from entire paragraphs caged in parentheses to italicized dialogue that glides like airport conveyor walkways. The result is energetic, concise, and acrobatic. Audrey chalks her hands and always sticks the landing.”
— Anna Krivolapova, author of Incurable Graphomania

“Whether surrounded by luxury or mired in poverty, the characters of Utter Goodness aren’t quite where they belong. Yet it isn’t depressing or nihilistic, even in its strange beauty… Utter Goodness feels like an experience transmogrified into parables, as if Audrey Lee has taken the sum of her parts and crafted something wholly new. She is a natural storyteller, and the world is richer for her having shared these stories with us.”
— Oliver Land on Substack