We are delighted to be able to welcome the author Nora Lange to Caper, in conversation with critic Jude Cook, talking about Nora's debut novel Us Fools – a 'tragicomic, award-winning novel of two precocious sisters coming of age during the midwest farm crisis in 1980s America' as well as her short fiction collection Day Care - stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation which are at once hilarious and savage. Nora's writing is deservedly celebrated, and perfect for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Miranda July, Rita Bullwinkel, and others writing about the tensions of modern womanhood. Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the ‘Great American Novel’ by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, in the short fiction collection Day Care, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by. The stories in Day Care include ‘Heart Beats’: Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of “messy socialising” with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a “kinky sort of game” while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In ‘Island of Phaetons’, an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with “the husband” and “the friend who wanted more than friendship” to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece “with news” for her daughter, a tantalising invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In ‘Dog Star’, two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex. These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage. Nora Lange has been awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, Us Fools was named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. Lange’s ‘Hot Spot’, featured in The New Yorker’s July 2025 summer