Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name. Her latest book, Wit's End, came out in April 2008. Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and spent the first eleven years of her life there. Her family then moved to Palo Alto, California. Fowler attended the University of California, Berkeley, and majored in political science. After... having a child during the last year of her master's program, she spent seven years devoted to child-raising. Feeling restless, Fowler decided to take a dance class, and then a creative writing class at the University of California, Davis. Realizing that she was never going to make it as a dancer, Fowler began to publish science fiction stories, making a name for herself with Artificial Things , a collection of short stories. Her work as a genre writer tended toward eccentric tales of implausible history. Often these tales had a feminist theme or mindset.
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