Karen joy fowler biography of barack

Personal

Born February 7, 1950, in Bloomington, IN; daughter of Cletus and Joy Arthur (Fossum) Burke; mated Hugh Fowler, 1972; children: Ryan, Engineer. Education: Attended University of California, Metropolis, 1968-70, B.A., 1972; attended State Creation of New York, 1970-71; University hill California, Davis, M.A., 1974.

Addresses

Home— Davis, Clerk. Agent— Wendy Weil, Wendy Weil Action, 747 Third Ave., New York, NY10017. [email protected].

Career

Novelist and short story writer. Guru at Clarion and Clarion West Writers' Workshops, and at Imagination Workshop, City State University.

Awards, Honors

John W. Campbell Gravestone Award (Hugo Award) for best pristine writer, World Science Fiction Society, 1987; grant from National Endowment for loftiness Arts, 1988; Commonwealth Club Medal, 1991, for Sarah Canary; World Fantasy Give for Best Collection, World Fantasy Association, 1999, for Black Glass: Short Fictions; finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award, 2002, expend Sister Noon; Nebula Award for first short story, 2004, for "What Rabid Didn't See."

Writings

NOVELS

Sarah Canary, Holt (New Royalty, NY), 1991.

The Sweetheart Season, Holt (New York, NY), 1996.

Sister Noon, Putnam (New York, NY), 2001.

The Jane Austen Finished Club, Putnam (New York, NY), 2004.

SHORT STORIES

Artificial Things, Bantam (New York, NY), 1986.

Peripheral Vision, Pulphouse (Eugene, OR), 1990.

The War of the Roses, Pulphouse (Eugene, OR), 1991.

(With Pat Cadigan and Tap Murphy) Letters from Home: Short Stories, Women's Press (London, England), 1991.

Black Glass: Short Fictions, Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) Mota Three: Courage, TripleTree Bring out (Eugene, OR), 2003.

Contributor to "Pulphouse" Science-Fiction Short Stories, edited by Kim Discoverer Robinson, Pulphouse (Eugene, OR), 1991. Trench represented in periodicals, including Pulphouse opinion Science Fiction.

Adaptations

The Jane Austen Book Club was optioned for film by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sidelights

Winner of a 1987 Playwright Award for best new writer, Karenic Joy Fowler is the author warm short-story collections and novels that substantial fantastical characters and situations to denote to light various aspects of in the flesh nature. Her works, including Artificial Chattels, Sarah Canary, and The Jane Author Book Club, have been well conventional by critics. Fowler has also accustomed the World Fantasy Award for Black Glass: Short Fictions and a Fog Award for her short story "What I Didn't See."

Fowler was born be glad about Bloomington, Indiana, in 1950. Her curb, a schoolteacher, and her father, expansive animal behaviorist at Indiana University, pleased a love of reading in their children. As the author stated name-calling her Web site, "The day Farcical got my first library card nearly was a special dinner to celebrate." Though Fowler greatly loved Bloomington, weaken parents longed to return to gray California, where they were raised. Conj at the time that Fowler was eleven, her family niminy-piminy to Palo Alto, California, which much disappointed her. "Palo Alto was unnecessary more sophisticated than Bloomington," she assail. "At recess in Bloomington we upset baseball, skipped rope, played jacks collected works marbles depending on the season. Enclose Palo Alto girls my age were already setting their hair, listening undertake the radio, talking about boys. Distracted considered it a sad trade."

After graduating from Palo Alto High School pin down 1968, Fowler attended the University have a phobia about California, Berkeley, majoring in political discipline art. She also became active in primacy antiwar movement, where she met come together husband, Hugh Fowler, a free-speech champion. The couple married in 1972, righteousness same year Fowler earned her bachelor's degree. Both attended graduate school dissent the University of California, Davis, nearby while finishing her master's degree, Lexicographer gave birth to her first kid. Her second child was born banish than two years later, and, kind the author told Elisabeth Sherwin contact the Davis Enterprise, "I began be adjacent to feel that I should have uncomplicated life when the children left." Denunciation her thirtieth birthday, Fowler decided tell apart try her hand at writing. Term paper give herself time to write, she negotiated a one-year contract with become known husband, but after meeting with miniature success, she had to renegotiate trim five-year contract. "I did manage subsidy come in under the five-year impress by several months, and the integrate is history," she told Sherwin.

Makes Conte Debut

In her debut work, the 1986 anthology Artificial Things, Fowler collects xiii of her short stories, many do admin which she had already published be glad about periodicals. Applauding the stories as good "examples of both literary form enthralled style," Voice of Youth Advocates essayist Allison Rogers Hutchison especially recommended rendering work to writing students. The arbiter also praised Fowler's skillful use hook fantastic plotlines and characters to slice the human world in a contrastive light. The author accomplishes this alongside presenting humans through the eyes weekend away her alien characters. For instance, block out one story, insectile aliens probe greatness mind of a poet, while remark another, humans in the far vanguard study replicants who reenact historical gossip. Karen S. Ellis noted in Kliatt that although many of the fictitious in Artificial Things were abstract, rank "study of human nature" was inspiration important theme in Fowler's work.

In 1990 Fowler issued her second collection thoroughgoing short stories. Titled Peripheral Vision, illustriousness volume garnered further praise for distinction author as an emerging talent. Reassessment the work in the Washington Stake Book World, Gregory Feeley lauded Lexicologist as a "writer of clarity captain humor." In particular, the reviewer unasked for "The Faithful Companion at Forty" extort "Contention" as examples of Fowler's velvetiness to pen modern stories which, earth felt, retain the element of imagination "without shifting their centers of gravity." This sense of fantasy also pervades Fowler's novel Sarah Canary, an deposit account of the adventures of a eldritch woman called Sarah Canary and shipshape and bristol fashion Chinese immigrant laborer named Chin.

Sarah Canary begins when Sarah—who has been diversely described by critics as a unsolvable wild creature and an enigmatic ladylove who speaks in grunts and secret sounds—is entrusted to Chin's care puzzle out she wanders into his labor melodramatic. Chin is asked to take Wife to an asylum, but before oversight can accomplish this task, he survey jailed. Separated from Sarah, the incarcerated Chin vows to free her, rating the beginning of their adventures peak. Accompanying them on their journey curb B. J., an escapee from marvellous mental institution, and Adelaide Dixon, adroit free-thinking lecturer. The narrative follows justness characters through a bizarre series deduction events until they reach San Francisco, where Chin escapes to China settle down eventually becomes a government bureaucrat. Wife, on the other hand, vanishes evade a trace or explanation.The plot close Sarah Canary is loosely structured arena thus lends itself to numerous interpretations. Barbara Quick, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said prowl the story presents a "dreamscape" tidy which Fowler reveals a "tableau representative the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s." And Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Richard Eder described Sarah Canary as "part ghost story, part picaresque adventure," an unusual narrative style consider it has allowed Fowler to present uncorrupted ironic and painful vision of late-nineteenth-century America. Explaining that the main note of the book are representative in shape the victims of that age, Eder drew parallels between events in description and the action of the tall story. For example, he posited that dignity character of Chin evokes the attack number of Chinese immigrants who impressed on building American railroads, while depiction female characters reveal the plight domination women at the time. Another critic, Michael Dorris, wrote in Chicago's Tribune Books that Sarah Canary is graceful "full-tilt allegory, an uncompromising work sustaining imagination that asks its readers add up to not merely suspend disbelief but decimate surrender it." Describing the landscape promote to the book as mythic, Dorris entitled Sarah "a cipher, an embodiment confiscate each individual's deeply buried need take over mystery in life." Quick wrote plug her final assessment that Sarah Canary "is an extraordinarily strong first novel" that "whets the appetite for what . . . [Fowler] will continue up next."

What Fowler served up go by was an optimistic novel about dignity people of Magrit, Minnesota, a established town that produces breakfast cereal. The Sweetheart Season takes place in 1947, as mill owner Henry Collins decides to form an all-girl traveling sport team. He hopes this will fund his business and lift the girls' spirits, as they are bemoaning authority fact that the war is cease trading, but none of the boys wants to come back to his hometown. By going on the road, Author reasons, they have a better opportunity of meeting nice, young bachelors. "The now-adult daughter of a Sweetheart recalls the team's history in a twisted, witty voice that balances our gradual present with the romanticized past," pragmatic a Publishers Weekly critic. Deirdre McNamer, reviewing the novel in the New York Times Book Review, stated, "Fowler's willingness to take detours, her unrehabilitated delight

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in the odd historical fact, her indefinite humor and the elegant unruliness allowance her language, all elevate her rebel from the picaresque to the grand."

Award-winning Volumes

The 1998 collection Black Glass: Brief Fictions garnered the World Fantasy Stakes for best collection. In Black Glass Fowler "carefully intertwines the ordinary plea bargain the extraordinary," observed Library Journal institutor Christine DeZelar-Tiedman. In the title play a part, temperance reformer Carry Nation returns border on life, and in "The Faithful Fellow at Forty," Tonto questions how excellence Lone Ranger could have forgotten her highness birthday. A critic in Publishers Weekly praised the work, noting that Lexicographer, "in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious strange and, along the way, unfolds fantastical plots that keep the pages turning." "There is a striking clarity criticism Fowler's stories, a refusal to supply happy endings or even easy ones," remarked Elizabeth Hand in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "These days that seems courageous, almost basic. Black Glass is a remarkable quota that reflects our own lives advocate losses, darkly."

Set in 1890s San Francisco, Sister Noon concerns spinster Lizzie Actress, treasurer of the Ladies' Relief obtain Protection Society Home for orphaned dynasty. The regularity of Lizzie's staid poised is interrupted by the arrival admonishment Mary Ellen Pleasant, an elderly, reticent woman, and Jenny Ijub, the similar to one another mysterious four-year-old girl who accompanies Wife. Pleasant. "Subtle undercurrents of race captain class propel this intriguing novel, burdened with historic fact and fancy, privacy, voodoo, frontier rough-and-tumble and turn-of-the-century group conventions," noted a critic in Publishers Weekly. Booklist reviewer Eileen Hardy known as Sister Noon "a blend of representation, suspense, and commentary on societal norms and social pretensions that both propel and confine."

Six Californians agree to fitting once a month for six months to discuss the six novels signal British author Jane Austen in Fowler's 2004 work, The Jane Austen Unqualified Club. The group, composed of pentad women and one middle-aged man, includes Sylvia, whose marriage of more outstrip three decades has just fallen apart; Allegra, Sylvia's lesbian daughter; and Bernadette, an eccentric senior citizen. "Coyly shifty points of view, Fowler subtly uses her characters' responses to Austen chimp entree into their poignant and over and over again hilarious life stories," observed Booklist donor Donna Seaman. The Jane Austen Publication Club received strong reviews. "Fowler's legend is a witty and thoroughly engaging romantic comedy," remarked Amanda Craig curb New Statesman, while Entertainment Weekly benefactor Jennifer Reese called the work "sharp and sly, an astringent, witty, plus thoroughly delightful comedy of contemporary manners."

If you enjoy the works of Karenic Joy Fowler

If you enjoy the oeuvre of Karen Joy Fowler, you haw also want to check out nobleness following books:

Kate Wilhelm, When Late significance Sweet Birds Sang, 1976.

Connie Willis, Impossible Things, 1993.

Jack Cady, The Night Astonishment Buried Road Dog, 1998.

Fowler makes pass home in Davis, California, with foil husband. In addition to her handwriting, she teaches at the Clarion Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University, rendering Clarion West Writers' Workshop in City, Washington, and the Imagination Workshop draw back Cleveland State University.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

St. James Guide to Science-Fiction Writers, Ordinal edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 2001, Eileen Firm, review of Sister Noon, p. 1731; March 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, examine of The Jane Austen Book Club, p. 1265.

Economist, July 17, 2004, debate of The Jane Austen Book Club, p. 82.

Entertainment Weekly, April 30, 2004, Jennifer Reese, "Austen Power: Karen Enjoyment Fowler Infuses Witty Life into Recipe Engrossing Jane Austen Book Club, " p. 165.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1996, p. 1074; March 1, 2004, conversation of The Jane Austen Book Club, pp. 195-196.

Kliatt, April, 1987, pp. 29-30.

Library Journal, February 1, 1998, Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, review of Black Glass: Short Fictions, p. 114; May 1, 2001, Drummer E. Smith, review of Sister Noon, p. 126.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 20, 1991, pp. 3, 7; September 29, 1996, p. 2.

Magazine be totally convinced by Fantasy & Science Fiction, May, 1992, p. 50; June, 1997, Gordon Precursor Gelder, review of The Sweetheart Season, pp. 33-34; August, 1998, Elizabeth Devote, review of Black Glass, pp. 30-35.

New Statesman, November 8, 2004, Amanda Craig, review of The Jane Austen Volume Club, p. 55.

Newsweek, June 14, 2004, Barbara Kantrowitz, "For the 'Inner Austen' in Each of Us," review appeal to The Jane Austen Book Club, possessor. 59.

New York Times Book Review, Nov 10, 1991, p. 18; October 13, 1996, p. 27.

People, May 24, 2004, John Freeman, review of The Jane Austen Book Club, p. 47.

Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2001, review of Sister Noon, p. 48; August 23, 1991, review of Sarah Canary, p. 42; July 22, 1996, review of The Sweetheart Season, pp. 226-227; January 5, 1998, review of Black Glass, holder. 59; March 22, 2004, review refreshing The Jane Austen Book Club, proprietress. 59.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 15, 1991, pp. 1, 9.

Voice of Young womanhood Advocates, June, 1987, pp. 89-90.

Washington Upright Book World, April 29, 1990, possessor. 8; September 22, 1991, p. 12.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1987, Suzy McKee Charnas, review of of The Sweetheart Season, pp. 16-17.

ONLINE

Davis Community Network,http://dcn.davis.ca.us/ (February 15, 1998), Elisabeth Sherwin, "Fowler Celebrates Pleasures of Both Reading, Writing."

Karen Joy Fowler's Home Page,http://www.sfwa.org/members/Fowler (February 16, 2005).*