Robin McLean worked as a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first story collection, Reptile House, won the BOA Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. Her debut novel, Pity the Beast, was noted as a best book of fiction in 2021 in the The Guardian and Wall Street Journal. Her second story collection—Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing—was published in October 2022, was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times, and was longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada. She lives in the high desert West.