The Drama Room

A surprising, edgy, and original writer.

-Jayne Anne Phillips, Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize

Searle is more compassionate than censorious, more Salingeresque than scathing (think of Nathaniel West or Flannery O'Conner). She is adventurous in exploring points of view, voices, and streams of consciousness; suggestive with symbolism; deft in managing perspectives in time, and her endings are genuine, visionary break-throughs.

-DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, author of Top Cop Kills

She anchors narratives atop American classics as varied Edgar Alan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and the musical The Fantasticks. Across her celebrated career, her ongoing genius is in fore-fronting the culture's present sickness. What is out there-pandemic contagion, predatory men, mass shooters, politically retrograde thinkers-might be ... in here, inside the family, the school building, the work place, the bedroom. Fast-paced and entertaining, Searle's stories offer high drama, but also a clear sense of what it is like to have an anxious brain and an aware body in a world heaving with turmoil.

-Debra Spark author Discipline, and Unknown Caller

Searle's dramatic instincts are fearless, scathing and often comedic; her dialogue is a master class in brilliance.

In her libretto, 'Tonya & Nancy: the Opera,' based on public quotes, Elizabeth Searle has taken a bizarre, notorious incident in American women's figure skating history, and made of it a lethally funny commentary on the graceless maneuvers of fear and ambition, on the media as Greek chorus, on how to demonstrate, with the rapier slice of a skater's blade, Simone Weil's conviction that the only question worth asking is "Why am I being harmed?"

-Melissa Pritchard, author The Odditorium and Flight of the Wild Swan

The accomplishment of Elizabeth Searle's work is that it feels contemporary and timely and relevant but never merely topical or trendy; her formal experimentation in story after story is a powerful reflection of our disequlibirum.

-David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

Lust, violence, love and grief-if there is an edge, Elizabeth Searle will push it and if there is a pulse, she will put her finger right on it. The stories in her latest collection, THE DRAMA ROOM: A COLLECTION IN THREE ACTS, showcase an enormous range in awareness and understanding of the human condition and the author's skillful gift to surprise and deliver.

-Jill McCorkle, author Life After Life and Old Crimes