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Unlike the heroines of domestic fiction, Katherine Karlin's women face their biggest challenges outside of the house. The characters in this debut collection encompass a broad range of experience: a struggling young woman in post-Katrina New Orleans persuades a welder to teach her his trade; an orchestra oboist hears a confession from a beloved teacher; an idealistic aerobics instructor decamps for revolution-era Nicaragua to pick coffee on a farming collective.
In each of these stories, Karlin offers rare insight into the place of work in the lives of women, her narrators keenly observant and attuned to the humor that arises when life doesn't turn out as planned. But even more remarkable is the fullness with which she renders characters who make us wonder how they've escaped the notice of other writers. In unadorned prose that evokes complete worlds with deceptive ease, Karlin shows us people immersed in the negotiations of survival, just at the edge of being able to make sense of their lives.
"Starred Review. These stories are a miracle of pacing, hitting the short story sweet spot time and again and ending exactly when they should... Karlin deserves serious attention." - Publishers Weekly
"A good addition to collections of contemporary short fiction, this will be of interest to both literary and general readers." - Library Journal
"The stories here are note-perfect and consistently gratifying." - Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia: A Novel
This information about Send Me Work was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Karlin's stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, ZYZZYVA, Alaska Quarterly Review, L.A. Weekly, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been selected for the Pushcart Prize and New Stories From the South. She has worked in oil refineries in Pennsylvania and Texas, a New Orleans shipyard, and a New York print shop, and currently she teaches creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. You can check out her website at www.katherinekarlin.com.
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