This is one of those books that I read and finish and then forget with that curious brand of immediate reader amnesia I sometimes get, which is what caused me to start writing goodreads reviews in the first place. The amnesia is a pity, because I'm pretty sure I found it frequently charming. Pagi...
I do love Fowler's work. But I have to say I found this book a disappointment.The story concerns the members of a Jane Austen book club--five women and one man--who meet to discuss the books. The structure is thus roughly divided into six months, and each month one of the people leads the discuss...
WHY I READ THIS BOOKFowler is best known as the author of "The Jane Austen Book Club." Based on that book, I had dismissed the author as a chick lit writer and never so much as glanced at her other work.Several months ago, there was an ongoing online discussion about why female authors were rarel...
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, ve...
Karen uses a first person, present tense frame around a past tense narrative that often sounds omniscient--a terrific risk that I love, getting omniscient effects out of a first person narrator, a gambit the novel shares with one of my favorites, The Great Gatsby. This approach is sometimes refe...
"You can do anything you want. You don't have to be the same person your whole life."I really liked this tale focusing on the elite of early San Francisco in the mid 1800s. Fowler writes of Lizzie Hayes, an unmarried well off woman who works as the treasurer for a white orphanage, the Brown Ark; ...
You in your cradle. You've never heard these noises before, and they are making you cry. Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father's too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand...
KAREN JOY FOWLER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON Do they really put chopped nuts in sushi in Santa Cruz? It’s one of the town’s many charms. There is a rumor that L. Ron Hubbard played a role in your development as a writer. Explain. My story “Recalling Cinderella” was published in Writers of the Fut...
The History of Everything There’s never been a world that isn’t a world at war. That’s the truest thing we know, and we’ve known it since we were boys, since before we got our orders and obeyed them. We weren’t equipped or expected to end that war. We were equipped to move over ground, kill t...
Her name was Luya. She’d shown him the photo of the man she was marrying. Lowell could think of nothing good to say about a man who wouldn’t even meet her at the airport, so he’d said nothing. Another man on the bus asked her if she was in the business; neither she nor Low...
She was walking with him on the beach below Wit’s End. The sky was starless, but the water glowed with an eerie green light. The waves broke on the sand like emeralds.Out in the middle distance, floating on that luminous green, was a boat. Rima could just make out the shadowy figure of a man on d...