Annie Bruno
Award-Winning Author
New Release
Until You Find Your Way
In the aftermath of losing their eldest child, Beada and Porter have become an estranged couple, living on different continents. She’s in rural Minnesota raising their two other teens, while Porter visits from Bangkok “when he can,” disguising his pain as arrogance. When Beada’s only outlet—careful, unorthodox confessions to the local priest—take an abrupt turn, a quiet but seismic shift forces everyone in the family to decide what they cannot live without.
Winner of the Howling Brid Press Fiction Prize
Coming in March 2026
Cally stayed at John’s on Sunday night because Monday was Veteran’s Day and she didn’t have to work. This was perfectly fine with John who didn’t have a job and didn’t keep track of the days of the week, say nothing of holidays. He lived in a sprawling apartment on Central Park West by some mysterious arrangement, while Cally lived with a roommate in Brooklyn, which was convenient to her job at J.P. Morgan, down on Wall Street, where she answered phones and made plane reservations to places she’d never been for people she’d never met.
Read other work by Annie Bruno
As most everyone by now knows, a little family of French bistros lies scattered over the lower half of Manhattan, as if arranged by the single pass of a great pepper mill. Named Le Gamin (save one Le Deux Gamin), each is a neighborhood place, a paradox of quiet and noisy, sunny and dark, boring and piqued, where woody rosemary stems turn your plate of crepes into a miniature Provencal landscape and your drained café au lait reveals le gamin himself at the bottom.​
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I took a sublet in Williamsburg. Before long, I had set up a little life for myself, with a new routine that included a morning swim at the Metropolitan pool... On a day off from work, a Tuesday, I went to swim a bit later than usual. At first the pool was as crowded as ever, but near 10:00 a.m. all the thrashing, ready-to-race-you men suddenly cleared out. It seemed too good to be true, so I asked the lifeguard if I needed to get out, too. He was hanging up some thick, living-room drapes on a long rod to obscure the front windows looking out onto the lobby.​
“No, you’re a girl,” he said. “You can stay.”​
About Annie
Annie Bruno has published essays in the collections Lost & Found: Stories from New York and Dog Culture, and short stories in The Mississippi Review and Black Heart Magazine. She lives in California.