Lauren E. Osborn is the author of Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl, a Winter/Spring 2026 Indies Introduce selection. 
A bookseller from Third Place Books Ravenna in Seattle, Washington, served on the panel that selected Osborn's book for Indies Introduce.
“Disturbing, dangerous, and unexpectedly elegant. This debut collection grabs hard and doesn’t let go as women become sublime and transcend the ordinary, and men more often than not try to thwart them. Osborn’s writing is kaleidoscopic and precise, and Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl does a grand job showcasing her welcome and exciting new voice,” they said of the title.
Osborn sat down with them to discuss this debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion. You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.
Bookseller: Hello. I am the manager and bookseller at Third Place Books Ravenna in Seattle, Washington. I am thrilled today to be interviewing Lauren E. Osborn. Lauren lives and writes in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with her menagerie of tarantulas and other creatures. Her fiction and nonfiction can be read in The North American Review, The Adroit, Diagram, and elsewhere. She is currently serving as the 2025 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and she is the author of the forthcoming collection Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl.
There were so many things I loved about this book. It's not the kind of book I usually encounter, so being able to find it through the Indies Introduce program was really exciting. It's so tender and so raw and so poignant and so beautifully written. Something I just noticed as I was looking at your bio is that you are the “emerging” writer, which seems very apropos for your collection; there's a lot of emergence from a lot of different things and forms.
I'm really excited to talk to you about the book and the process and the constructs around it. When we were talking about it in the Indies Introduce meetings, there were a lot of realist novels and fantasy novels that came across to us. Then, this little short story collection, that I kept being drawn to and kept pulling back into the conversation, it was so exciting and so different and so beautifully done.
Lauren E. Osborn: Thank you so much!
Bookseller: It was a real pleasure to be able to recommend it, and to have all of us come together on the panel and include it on our list. I'm really excited about being able to handsell it when it comes out.
LEO: Thank you! I'm thrilled to have this conversation. I appreciate all your kind words; it means the world.
Bookseller: I would love to talk about your experience with your publisher. With bookselling, we spend a lot of time dealing with the Big Five, and I am excited to have some attention on a small press. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with them?
LEO: Working with Dzanc has been an incredible experience. I don't think I could have asked for a better publisher — Michelle Dotter and Chelsea Gibbons specifically. They're wonderful people, and I felt really comfortable communicating with them throughout the process of editing — and the covers, and illustrations, and all the other little things that go into publishing that I wasn't aware of until this process. I couldn't have dreamed up a better experience for my first book. Dzanc feels like a family now. They have a lifelong fan.
Bookseller: I’m glad to hear that. I love stories where the author is really well taken care of.
In your book, there are so many different things that happen in so many perfect, little, crystalline moments of transformation. Is there an insect experience in the collection that especially resonates for you, or a story that feels closer to home than the others?
LEO: I feel like all of the insect experiences resonate with me in some small way or another, but there are a few characters in the book that I do feel closer to either in personality or worldview. The spider/girl/cluster from “Gossamer Girl” is probably my favorite character, because of the delicate things she notices and how she feels out of place but makes it work.
I can also relate to Dr. Bänzinger’s religious reverence for the moths in “The Gospel of Vampire Moths,” that mixture between science and religion and reverence. And, of course, I relate to Grete Samsa as a universal female experience.
But the more I think about it, I find myself mirroring the protagonist of “Two of Every Kind” a little more than any of the other protagonists. There's this underlying pressure of responsibility to save insects whenever I can or whatever way possible.
If I find a spider in my apartment, I'll just let it be. I'll have a spider roommate for a little bit. If I see a bee on the sidewalk that needs help, I'll nudge it off the sidewalk and make sure it's okay. When I first moved into my apartment in Gettysburg, there was a roly-poly in the bathroom and she was pregnant. They carry their little babies underneath them, sort of like possums. I was able to put her in a bioactive terrarium, and now I have this roly-poly colony I'm responsible for, in addition to all the tarantulas I already live with. I related to that character in wanting to find ways to help, whenever I can; I think I would create a Noah's Ark of bugs, if I could.
Bookseller: That's a fun idea. I like that. Your collection acts, in some ways, as that ark in carrying them.
Do you see yourself sticking with the short story form? Or do you think that you might turn something into a novel one day for us?
LEO: If I ever write a novel, it's going to be by accident. It’ll have to sneak up on me somehow.
I've intentionally started a few novels in the past, but in the end, I’m impatient and I rip them up and make them short stories anyway. I really love writing the short story form. It's satisfying to see the ending from the beginning. It feels more tangible to me. The stories I've been writing recently have been on the longer side, so maybe someday, something that I intend to be a short story will become something larger. Maybe someday!
Bookseller: That'd be a fun adventure!
We are in an age where there are a lot of movies and limited series and whatnot coming out of literature. If any or all of the stories in this collection were turned into a film or TV show, who can you see as the cast?
LEO: I love movies! I'm a big cinema person, and seeing my stories on screen would be an absolute dream come true. Casting would be a little tough. Thinking about casting Grete, I could envision somebody like Mia Goth doing a fabulous job. I really loved her in Del Toro's Frankenstein, and there was lots of insect imagery and inspiration there too, which was lovely. I can also envision Greta being played by someone like Elle Fanning, she has this bright joy about her that I really love. Or maybe even Anne Hathaway.
Thinking of a drama cast, I'm going to list a lot of names out here. I would definitely choose my favorite actor of all time, Nicolas Cage. I could also see Lupita Nyong’o, Tilda Swinton, Kate Siegel, FKA twigs, Pamela Anderson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Charlize Theron, Dita Von Teese, and Isabella Rossellini.
They would be amazing actors and actresses for the job and are sort of who I was imagining as I was writing.
Bookseller: Wow. I'm now stuck on the idea of Isabella Rossellini and what she would bring.
LEO: I love her Green Porno series. It's excellent. It never fails to delight.
Bookseller: What a cool casting idea. I love that, I want that for us now: a limited series with each story with one or two of those people, and they are all connected like a web.
LEO: The web imagery would be awesome!
Bookseller: Now we need to find a producer! You talked about the insect imagery in Frankenstein, where it’s so beautifully done. There's so much richness and texture in that film and in your collection, so that’s a movie that's in conversation with your book. What books do you think are “in conversation” with your book?
LEO: That's a tough question because I do believe that all books are in conversation with one another in some small way. I really believe in the interconnectedness of literature and ideas and philosophies.
I would love to see what connections that readers naturally make with their favorite books or things that they've already read, whether it be in the genres of philosophy or mythology, even theology, occultism, feminist fiction, or folk tales. I really do like folklore a lot. But, of course, Kafka's The Metamorphosis would be something that I would recommend reading in conversation. It was a huge inspiration for the collection as a whole.
I do think it would also be interesting to read in conversation with the Holy Bible, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Nietzsche, or books on insect biology and behavior. I think those would bloom some interesting conversations and connections. I also recently discovered the book Staying with the Trouble by Donna Jeanne Haraway. It's an eco-feminist critical text. I was delighted when I started reading it. I haven't finished it, but I'm really enjoying it so far. I think a lot of the ideas that I was working with an Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl seemed to be echoed in her philosophy.
Whatever my book is read with, I just hope people enjoy it and have a good time.
Bookseller: People are going to have a wonderful time with it. I feel like I can really easily comp it with Karen Russell or those kinds of authors where it's real, but it's not real, and you're never quite certain what's happening, but you want it to keep happening.
You mentioned Donna Haraway. I was thinking of Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Women Who Run with the Wolves and that deeply psyche driven, very feminine, very feminist, rewilding.
I was thinking about the novel Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott, which has that same sort of folkloric, transformative sense that your collection has. I think they'll appeal a lot to the same readers, because they go hard in some of the same ways, but then they're really tender and beautiful and breakable in some ways too.
LEO: Thank you so much! That’s excellent. I really do love Karen Russell and the magic realist vein that she works in. She definitely inspired some of the early stories too, how she navigates the balance between the magic and the mundane. I appreciate that you made those connections.
Bookseller: As I was reading the collection, there were a lot of moments where I was both reveling in it for myself, because I got to enjoy this incredible reading moment, but I was also thinking, “Okay, what am I going to do with this book? Where is it going to go in the store? Where am I going to push it harder? Who am I going to try to hand it to?” Those conversations are always happening as I'm reading something, especially because I'm so often reading things far ahead of when they come out, and so I have a lot of time to chew on that.
With this one, I keep going back to what it's going to look like on the front table when it comes in, with the new fiction, what it's going to look like on Staff Picks, or what it's going to look like faced out in the section, or which section I’m going to put it in.
I'm so excited for it. I cannot wait to be able to tell people about it. It's one of those books that I've been sitting on for so many months now, telling people, “I promise this book is coming. You're gonna love it.” The fact that it's finally almost here means I can start really handing it to people. It's so unique and so special and so gratifying.
LEO: Thank you so much. My heart is very full. It was fun to write!
Bookseller: What can we expect next from you?
LEO: I've been working on another short story collection; not so many flash fictions, working in that longer range of short stories, still in the magical realism vein. I have about five so far that I've decided to put together. I'm constantly writing and constantly thinking of story ideas; one of my favorite things to do is to write. Hopefully, within a year or two, I'll have something new.
Bookseller: I will wait eagerly for that. It has been lovely talking to you, and I am excited about your forthcoming collection. Thank you so much for joining us today in this conversation about the Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl.
LEO: Thank you so much! It's been an absolute pleasure.
Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl by Lauren E. Osborn (Dzanc Books, 9781938603709, PB, Short Stories, $17.95, On Sale: 05/12/26)
You can learn more about this author at laureneosborn.com.
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