Corie Adjmi is the executive producer of the films A Photographic Memory and Horsegirls. She is the USA Today best-selling, award-winning author of the novel The Marriage Box and the short story collection Life and Other Shortcomings. The Jewish Chronicle included The Marriage Box on a list of Best Jewish Books and the novel was featured as a Goodreads Most Popular Book. Corie’s prize-winning essays and short stories have appeared in dozens of journals and magazines, including HuffPost, Newsweek, North American Review, Indiana Review, Medium, Motherwell and Kveller. In 2024, Corie contributed an essay to the anthology, On Being Jewish Now edited by Zibby Owens. She and her husband have five children and a number of grandchildren, with more on the way. She lives and works in New York City.

Life and Other Shortcomings is a collection of linked short stories that takes the reader from New Orleans to New York City to Madrid, and from 1970 to the present day. The women in these twelve stories make a number of different choices: some work, others don’t; some stay married, some get divorced; others never marry at all. Through each character’s intimate journey, specific truths are revealed about what it means to be a woman—in relationship with another person, in a particular culture and era—and how these conditions ultimately affect her relationship with herself. The stories as a whole depict patriarchy, showing what still might be, but certainly what was, for some women in this country before the #MeToo movement. Both a cautionary tale and a captivating window into women’s lives, Life and Other Shortcomings is required reading for anyone interested in an honest, incisive, and compelling portrayal of the female experience.

Casey Cohen, a Middle Eastern Jew, is a sixteen-year-old in New Orleans in the 1970s when she starts hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then she gets in trouble—and her parents turn her whole world upside down by deciding to return to their roots, the Orthodox Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.

In this new and foreign world, men pray daily, thanking God they’re not women; parties are extravagant events at the Museum of Natural History; and the Marriage Box is a real place, a pool deck designated for teenage girls to put themselves on display for potential husbands. Casey is at first appalled by this unfamiliar culture, but after she meets Michael, she’s enticed by it. Looking for love and a place to belong, she marries him at eighteen, believing she can adjust to Syrian ways. But she begins to question her decision when she discovers that Michael doesn’t want her to go to college—he wants her to have a baby instead.

Can Casey integrate these two opposing worlds, or will she have to leave one behind in order to find her way?