Roupenian's short story collection to be made into HBO drama series

HBO is developing a drama series based on Kristen Roupenian’s upcoming short story collection You Know You Want This.

Roupenian’s anthology was scooped up days after the record-breaking publication of her debut short story ‘Cat Person’ in the New Yorker, by Jonathan Cape, before Scout Press in the US bought it along with a novel in a deal reportedly worth $1.2m (£900,000). Altogether it has gone on to sell in 23 territories.

According to Deadline, You Know You Want This will be adapted by former writers of drama series "The Leftovers" Carly Wray and Lila Byock for HBO, however the provocative tale of online dating, ‘Cat Person’, is not included in the deal.

Wray was most recently a producer on Season 2 of “Westworld” after starting on “Mad Men”. Meanwhile, Byock is currently a producer on Lindelof’s forthcoming adaptation of "Watchmen" for HBO and spent five years on the New Yorker editorial staff. She

the news: "Big week for TV news! I am adapting Kristen Roupenian's brilliant short stories into an HBO series, alongside one of my very besties, noted genius @carlyawray."

You Know You Want This is currently a 10-story collection exploring the “complex - and often dark and funny - connections between gender, sex, and power, across genres”, due for publication in the UK on 7th February 2019. Earlier this month, Jonathan Cape released ‘Cat Person’ as a standalone paperback targeted partly at the gift market selling 1,731 copies so far for £6,747 according to Nielsen BookScan.

Roupenian also sold her horror-themed script on spec to A24, where it will be developed as a feature film, it was revealed in March.

She is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan, and won the Grand Prize winning story for the Eleventh Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards last year, as well as completing a PhD from Harvard.