BOOKS
GREAT BIG SMILE
“This might not seem like the setup for a character-driven soap opera of epic proportions, but that’s what the work becomes… Overall, this novel presents a series of compelling character sketches with wry humor and heartfelt revelations. Along the way, it also manages to tackle difficult topics with a surprising earnestness, including unwanted pregnancy, faith, and self-harm. An engaging and often lighthearted take on the nuances of relationships.” —Kirkus Reviews (FULL REVIEW)
Meet the eclectic employees of SmilePosts, the nation’s number one purveyor of school portraits. These uncelebrated heroes invade schools in the cities and suburbs, setting up their cameras in dusty auditoriums and sweat-stained gyms for the rite of passage known as picture day. They futilely persuade kindergarteners to sit still. They hold their breath in the reek of pubescent sixth-graders who need to discover deodorant. They are a motley group of mostly twenty-somethings, struggling with financial independence and unfulfilled dreams. They engage in uncertain workplace romances and form friendships that help them through the long days filled with thousands of student pictures. Sometimes the little kids pee on their equipment. It’s a hazard of the job. The yearly portraits they take endure on family staircase walls, nostalgic social media posts, and tragic nightly news broadcasts, but the photographers themselves are long forgotten. Great Big Smile is the story of these photographers.
READ AN EXCERPT: CHAPTER ONE
PERFECT (STORIES)
“Dorfman’s writing excavates the complexities of relationships, from their mysterious beginnings to their often bitter endings… Compelling plotlines create veneers of normality that fall away to reveal underlying pain; the result is a dark collection that readers will likely want to finish in one sitting. A compilation of intense, penetrative character observations.” —Kirkus Reviews (FULL REVIEW)
Failing to find perfection in his home life, a young father seeks it in a bowling alley. A despondent teenage girl is whisked by her manic dad through the world’s most popular theme park. An anxious boyfriend tries to salvage his relationship in a high stakes ferret heist. A newlywed questions her husband’s compassion when they find a lost boy on a crowded beach.
The short stories in this collection are tales of adults and children, searching for meaning in scattered places: couples struggling to know one another, children trying to comprehend the hardships of life, and adults wondering if they’ll ever find the answers. In humor and heartache, these characters strive to know each other and themselves.
READ STORIES ONLINE: "THE HAPPIEST PLACE" / "SCAR" / "BEACHGOERS"
SWAMPY GOES TO PROM
A satirical spin on young adult supernatural romance, this is the story of Swampy, a horrifying monster of the deep who is unleashed on the town of Bluford Springs when a brand new shopping mall is built on top of the swamp land he calls home. It is the story of Lindsay Morpletopple, a girl with a disturbing fetish for violence whose twisted pangs of desire cause her to fall for Swampy, even though he murders several of her closest friends at their initial meeting. It is the story of Teddy Bigshartz, a nerdy high school junior who is so in love with Lindsay that he befriends Swampy and sneaks him into B.S.H.S. as thinly disguised student Seth Manster, hoping to love her vicariously through her chosen monster mate. (It is also the story of a vampire fraternity’s battle with crystal meth dealers, a lovelorn witch’s lonely trip to the moon in the late 1960s, and MORE!) Swampy Goes to Prom is a tale of romance and psychological trauma and madcap slapstick and bravery and a climactic prom showdown involving turd demons from hell.
ALL THAT REMAINS
All That Remains is the story of the interconnected lives of four men. It is the story of Colin Benson, so frustratingly devoid of emotion that he is willing to wreak horrendous grief onto the life of his only friend in the world so that he might only feel something. It is the story of Justin Giacorozzi, a police officer with lofty intentions of making the world a better place and the more pressing distress of falling in love with his best friend's girl. It is the story of Jake Porter, an amateur boxer who is unable to feel physical pain due to a rare condition and who considers himself so spiritually unattached that he dates women purely for the challenge of not caring about them. And it is the story of Michael Bailey, a college freshman, who discovers that he has the sudden inexplicable ability to manipulate the matter around him and who the world expects to fill the rather daunting position of simultaneous superhero and prophet.
ABOUT
Jeremy Dorfman is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to his work as an author, he has served as a TV producer for shows on networks including ABC, NBC, and Netflix.