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3.0 

What I Didn't See

By Karen Joy Fowler
What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

  • First collection since the success of The Jane Austen Book Club brought Karen Joy Fowler to a whole new readership.
  • Contains two Nebula Award winners: "Always" and "What I Didn't See."
  • First collection since World Fantasy Award winning collection Black Glass.
  • Like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, Fowler has a broad literary audience as well as a dedicated genre readership.
  • Collects stories from magazines as diverse as McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Asimov's, Scifiction—many of which have been reprinted in Year's Best anthologies.
  • Fowler teaches regularly at conferences writing workshops, and has maintained a following in those communities.
  • Fowler is fave of ours and many booksellers—she is a witty and engaging speaker who has traveled widely for bookstore visits and will do readings in Northern California and at conferences for this collection.
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    3 Reviews

    3.0
    “I found this book on my tablet. I must have bought it in a bundle at some point, and then downloaded it at another point. I have a terrible memory so it isn't that unbelievable that I could have done both those things and forgotten it. I've been getting restless lately both with life and with the books I have planned to read, so I decided to just read this. I briefly googled the author's name and saw she wrote https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2152.The_Jane_Austen_Book_Club . I made some assumptions because of that. The first story in this collection is called "The Pelican Bar"; It tells the story of Norah, who is sent off to a special boarding school the day after her fifteenth birthday. Calling the boarding school inhumane or abusive feel like understatements, the food is inedible and often rotting, the floor is covered in insects... The girls there are punished severely if they ever say anything that is a lie; a lie is anything that doesn't crush their self esteem. Throughout the story there is a slight implication that the people who run this school aren't just figuratively monsters. The collection never gets that disturbing again, but it does continue in a similar style. The stories are wistful, melancholic and contain hints of the science-fictional, such as a poetry slam that may actually be to the death or a cult that probably doesn't grant the members immortality, but might. The fantastical hints add a dream like quality to the stories. The writing style and subject matter occasionally reminded me of a strange combination of https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1221698.Neil_Gaiman and https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5769907.Kazou_Ishiguro . Some of the stories will stick with me for a long time, some are already fading dreamlike leaving only an impression. Finding this collection of stories felt like making a new friend who likes to tell you stories about her life. You quickly realize that the stories all feel very implausible, but you also don't dare challenge her because if you do she may stop telling them.”

    About Karen Joy Fowler

    Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including Wit’s End and The Jane Austen Book Club, which spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was adapted as a major motion picture from Sony Pictures. Her novel Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and her short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award. She has co-edited three volumes of The James Tiptree Award Anthology and wrote the introduction to the recent Penguin edition of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.

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