Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy's Wife, and, most recently, Don't I Know You? Her short fiction has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Bomb, Failbetter, Glimmertrain, Mississippi Review, and Southwest Review, among others. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, their three children and their one very strange dog.
Novels
Collections
Books containing stories by Karen Shepard
The Future Dictionary of America (2004)
edited by
Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Eli Horowitz and Nicole Krauss
Karen Shepard recommends
Body of Stars (2021)
Laura Maylene Walter
"Laura Maylene Walter’s Body of Stars will be enjoyed as a novel that employs the fantastic to inventively explore both the victimization and the power of women in a world very much like our own, but its central pleasure and achievement may be its depiction of a complicated and extraordinarily moving sibling relationship. In Walter’s generous and capable hands, Miles and Celeste remind us that love often means damage, and that the true test of love is not avoiding that damage, but repairing it when we’ve caused it."
Glorious Boy (2020)
Aimee Liu
"No doubt Aimee Liu's ambitious novel, Glorious Boy, will be praised, deservedly, as historical fiction, an adventure novel, even a ripping yarn, but the heart of this book is what it means to be a mother. Liu's sympathetic and complicated protagonist, Claire Durant, finds herself challenged when it comes to connecting with her atypical son, and the book asks us all to consider whose responsibility it is to be better with and to other human beings, especially those with whom we're most intimate. How do we learn what isn't instinct? How do we protect ourselves and others from our own best intentions? With a generous and exacting eye, Liu explores these questions and more, and we, lucky readers, get to go along for the ride."
