A short life of the author
Karen Joy Fowler (born 7 February 1950) is an American novelist and short story writer whose work moves between literary fiction and speculative fiction with a fluency that challenges the boundaries between them. She is best known for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) — a novel whose central secret is so brilliantly deployed that reviewers were asked not to reveal it — which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, Booth (2022), about the family of John Wilkes Booth, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Life
Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and grew up in a family connected to academia — her father was a professor of psychology, a background that informs the scientific and psychological dimensions of her fiction. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of California, Davis. She co-founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award (now the Otherwise Award) in 1991, which honours science fiction and fantasy that explores and expands gender.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013)
The narrator, Rosemary Cooke, begins her story in the middle — “Start in the middle,” she advises — and gradually reveals the circumstances of her childhood in a family shaped by a psychological experiment. The novel’s central revelation (which publishers asked reviewers to keep secret, and which I will respect here) transforms the reader’s understanding of everything that has come before, and the remainder of the novel explores the ethical consequences of that revelation with devastating specificity.
The book is simultaneously a family drama, a meditation on the ethics of scientific research, a story about loss and guilt, and an inquiry into the nature of consciousness and kinship. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — one of the first novels by an author with roots in the science fiction community to receive such mainstream literary recognition.
Booth (2022)
Fowler’s most ambitious novel follows the Booth family — the most famous theatrical family in nineteenth-century America — from the 1830s to the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. The novel centres not on John Wilkes Booth (who does not dominate the narrative) but on the entire family: the patriarch Junius Brutus Booth (a brilliant, mentally unstable Shakespearean actor), and his children Edwin (who became the greatest American actor of the century), Asia (a writer and memoirist), and John Wilkes (the assassin).
The novel’s achievement is to show how a single family produced both the most celebrated performer in American history and the man who committed its most infamous political murder — and to do so without reducing the story to a simple narrative of good brother versus bad brother.
Booth was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
Earlier Fiction
Sarah Canary (1991), Fowler’s debut, is set in 1873 Washington Territory and follows a mysterious woman who appears in a Chinese railroad workers’ camp. The novel resists genre classification — it can be read as literary fiction, as science fiction, or as a feminist fable about who gets to define reality.
The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) follows six Californians who form a book club to read all of Austen’s novels. The book is a comedy of manners that uses Austen’s themes (marriage, self-knowledge, social performance) to illuminate contemporary American lives. It was adapted into a 2007 film.
Short Fiction
Fowler is an accomplished short story writer. Her collections — Black Glass (1998) and What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (2010) — move fluently between realism and the fantastic. The title story of What I Didn’t See, about a gorilla-hunting expedition in Africa, won the Nebula Award.
Critical Standing
Fowler is one of the most critically acclaimed American writers of her generation — uniquely respected in both the literary and science fiction communities. Her ability to write novels that function simultaneously as realistic fiction and as speculative inquiry, without compromising either mode, is rare and valuable.
Collecting Fowler
Sarah Canary (1991, Holt) in first edition brings $30–$80. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013, Putnam) firsts are $20–$50. Booth (2022, Putnam) signed firsts are $30–$60. Her short story collections are modestly priced and undervalued.