Karen Joy Fowler

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About Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her new novel Booth will publish in March 2022.
She is the co-founder of the Otherwise Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego). Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler also supports a chimp named Caesar who lives at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
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Books By Karen Joy Fowler
'Wise, provocative and wildly endearing' Guardian
'Readably juicy and surreptitiously smart' Barbara Kingsolver
THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
Rosemary doesn't talk much, and about certain things she's silent. She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it's been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell.
Now at college, Rosemary starts to see she can't go forward without going back to the time when aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone.
It was Rosemary's parents who began all of the trouble - isn't it always? But, dear reader, exactly how they did it is a twist you'll have to discover for yourself.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH
AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 OPEN BOOK
'Accomplished, immersive and profoundly satisfying' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'Effortlessly resonant ... breathes rich imaginative colour in her characters' Daily Telegraph
From the million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family.
SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS. ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER.
Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.
Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise - but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.
'In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority' Guardian
'Karen Joy Fowler's novels are wildly inventive and deservedly popular' Daily Mail
'Booth is a triumph!' Ruth Ozeki
'Captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage ... An unalloyed triumph' Literary Review
'Brilliantly recounts the story of the American theatrical dynasty that produced Lincoln's assassin' Sunday Times Book of the Month
'Her finest, most beautiful novel to date' Neel Mukherjee
A moving, wise and delightfully modern comedy of manners from the bestselling, Man Booker shortlisted author Karen Joy Fowler.
Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love...
'A thoroughly delightful comedy of contemporary manners' Entertainment Weekly
Karen Joy Fowler is the Man Booker shortlisted, bestselling author of Sister Noon (a PEN/Faulkner prize finalist), Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, The Jane Austen Book Club, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and the story collection Black Glass. She is a PEN/Faulkner Prize finalist and lives in Davis and Santa Cruz, California.
'Words were invented so lies could be told' Mary Ellen Pleasant
San Francisco in the 1890s is a town of contradictions, home to a respectable middle class, but with the Wild West lingering in the imagination, and even the behaviour, of some residents. Lizzie Hayes, a seemingly docile, middle-aged spinster, is praised for her volunteer work with the Ladies' Relief and Protection Society Home, or the Brown Ark. She doesn't know it, but she's waiting for the spark that will liberate her from convention.
When the wealthy and well-connected but ill-reputed Mary Ellen Pleasant shows up at the Brown Ark with an orphan in tow, Lizzie is drawn to them both. It is the beautiful Mrs Pleasant, object of suspicion because of her mysterious past and rumoured voodoo practise, who holds the key to freeing Lizzie's rebellious nature.
Based on real historical figures, San Francisco in the gilded age is brought vibrantly to life in Karen Joy Fowler's entertaining, evocative and sinister novel.
NOVELLAS
The Dark Ride – John Kessel
NOVELETS
Interludes with the Gunwright – Jonathan L. Howard
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 51: The Great Fish – James Morrow
SHORT STORIES
Integral Nothings – Robert Reed
The Diamond Family Glitters – H. Pueyo
A Little Knife Music – Jenn Reese
N-raptured – Justin C. Key
Hard! – Van Aaron Hughes
Litter Witch – Susan Palwick
Wild Geese – Lavie Tidhar
The Piper – Karen Joy Fowler
POEMS
Annabel Digs Her Own Grave – Gretchen Tessmer
DEPARTMENTS
Books To Look For – Charles de Lint
Books – Elizabeth Hand
Games: Yakuza! – Marc Laidlaw
Films: Ending Things The Kaufman Way – Karin Lowachee
Science: How Fast Are We Going? – Jerry Oltion
Plumage From Pegasus: You Make the Best of What's Still Around – Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions –
Curiosities – Thomas Kaufsek
CARTOONS
Ali Solomon, Arthur Masear, Kendra Allenby.
COVER
Kent Bash
Rima Lanisell has a habit of losing things - car keys, sunglasses, lovers, family members. Following the death of Rima's father, she goes to stay with her godmother Addison, a wildly successful, albeit eccentric, mystery writer. Addison's beach house seems the place to make sense of Rima's loss, yet she is soon caught up in a mystery of her own. Who stole a small and highly valuable object from Addison's kitchen? Why is Rima corresponding with an obsessive fan, using someone else's family name? Most importantly: what exactly was the relationship between Addison and Rima's father, and why did Addison name a murderer after him in one of her novels?
A funny, sad and wise literary mystery from the author of The Jane Austen Book Club.
Gifted novelist Fowler (Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season) delights in the arcane, and, as a result, these 15 clever tales are occasionally puzzling but never dull.
In the long title story, temperance activist Carry Nation is resurrected in the 1990s ("We're talking about a very troubled, very big woman," says one shaken barman to reporters) and becomes such a nuisance that the DEA is forced to dispatch her with voodoo. Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In "Lieserl," a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in "The Faithful Companion at Forty," Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice ("But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There's an element of exhibitionism in it"). "The Travails" offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn't settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist. The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in "Duplicity" or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in "The View from Venus: A Case Study") seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.
Contents:
Black Glass (1991), Contention (1986), Shimabara (1995), The Elizabeth Complex (1996), Go Back (1998), The Travails (1998), Lieserl (1990), Letters from Home (1987), Duplicity (1989), The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987), The Brew (1995), Lily Red (1988), The Black Fairy's Curse (1997), The View from Venus (1986), Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)
A warm and witty novel from the bestselling, Man Booker shortlisted author Karen Joy Fowler.
'Polls have recently confirmed what has long been suspected; most men do not want brainy women. Stewardesses have turned out to be that occupation blessed most often with marriage. The key elements appear to be uniforms and travel.'
It is 1947 and in the aftermath of World War II halcyon days have not returned to Magrit, Minnesota, where the veterans have failed to come home. The men haven't died; they've just moved onto greener pastures, rejecting the local women, who served the war effort in the Scientific Kitchen of Margaret Mill. The mill was founded by Henry Collins, the man responsible for Sweetwheats, the world's first puffed and sugar-coated cereal. As part of a publicity campaign, Henry creates the Sweetwheats Sweethearts all-girl baseball team, convincing the mill girls that this will help them find husbands.
A trama, que se passa na Califórnia, começa quando Jocelyn, uma criadora de cães da raça Leão da Rodésia, decide montar um clube de leitura para discutir as obras de Jane Austen. Ela escolhe a dedo os integrantes: Sylvia, sua melhor amiga desde quando as duas tinham 11 anos; Allegra, filha de Sylvia; Prudie, professora de francês na escola local; a falante Bernadette, conhecida por ter se casado várias vezes; e Grigg, o único homem autorizado a participar.
Enquanto mergulha no universo de Jane Austen, o sexteto vive suas próprias histórias. Os leitores acompanham dramas como o divórcio de Sylvia, a morte da mãe de Prudie e o rompimento do namoro de Allegra. Mas nem tudo é tristeza: as irmãs mais velhas de Grigg dão uma ajuda para que ele se aproxime de sua paixão secreta, Bernadette encontra um novo marido e Jocelyn tem a chance de redescobrir o amor.
Sucesso de vendas nos Estados Unidos, O clube de leitura de Jane Austen mostra que Karen Joy Fowler é capaz de criar uma trama deliciosa, transportando para os dias de hoje a voz da escritora inglesa que soube, como ninguém, descrever a sociedade provinciana da Inglaterra no século XVIII. O livro de Fowler ganhou uma adaptação para o cinema, com roteiro de Robin Swicord e nomes como Emily Blunt e Kathy Baker no elenco.
Es war einmal ein Haus mit einem Garten, in dem wohnten ein Apfelbaum, ein Bach und ein kleine Katze mit mondgelben Augen. Hier wachsen drei Kinder auf: Rosemary, ihre ungestüme Schwester Fern und ihr großer Bruder Lowell. Sie könnten eine ganz normale Familie sein. Wäre ihr Vater nicht Wissenschaftler, und wäre Fern nicht ein ganz besonderes kleines Mädchen, das Wachsmalstifte verspeist, den perfekten Rückwärtssalto beherrscht und lacht wie eine Säge.
Jahre nach Ferns Verschwinden erzählt Rosemary nun deren Geschichte. Denn erzählen war das Einzige, was Fern nie konnte.
»Die wundersame Reise ins Herz einer Familie. Am Ende bricht das Buch dem Leser nicht einfach das Herz – es nimmt sein Herz und gibt es nicht mehr zurück.« Dan Chaon
»Mein Lieblingsbuch des Jahres.« Elizabeth George
Widely respected in the so-called “mainstream” for her New York Times bestselling novels, Karen Joy Fowler is also a formidable, often controversial, and always exuberant presence in Science Fiction. Here she debuts a provocative new story written especially for this series. Set in the days of Darwin, “The Science of Herself” is a marvelous hybrid of SF and historical fiction: the almost-true story of England’s first female paleontologist who took on the Victorian old-boy establishment armed with only her own fierce intelligence—and an arsenal of dino bones.
Plus…
“The Pelican Bar,” a homely tale of family ties that makes Guantánamo look like summer camp; “The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man,” a droll tale of sports, shoplifting and teen sex; and “The Motherhood Statement,” a quietly angry upending of easy assumptions that shows off Fowler’s deep radicalism and impatience with conservative homilies and liberal pieties alike.
And Featuring: our Outspoken Interview in which Fowler prophesies California’s fate, reveals the role of bad movies in good marriages, and intimates that girls just want to have fun (which means make trouble).
An extraordinary collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Sarah Canary. Including "Praxis", the story about a theater where the real and unreal collide; "The Poplar Street Study", Fowler's darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and "The Gates of Ghosts", in which a child journeys to a strange and deadly world, this anthology of 13 tales also features a new foreword by the author.
The lake was full of artificial things - The Poplar Street study - Face value - The dragon's head - The war of the roses - Contention - Recalling Cinderella - Other planes - The gate of ghosts - The bog people -Wild boys: variations on a theme - The view from Venus - Praxis