Kiss Me Someone

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Women on 2019-05-04 01:11Z by Steven

Kiss Me Someone

Tin House Books
2017-09-12
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-941040-75-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-941040-76-8

Karen Shepard

From the author of The Celestials, a collection of stories that will appeal to readers of Lucia Berlin, Mary Gaitskill, and Mia Alvar.

Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepard’s Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality they’re drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepard’s stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that it’s exactly where they belong.

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The Celestials

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Novels, United States on 2019-05-04 01:05Z by Steven

The Celestials

Tin House Books
2013-06-06
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935639-55-8

Karen Shepard

In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn’t speak English. They didn’t know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two.

Combining historical and fictional elements, The Celestials beautifully reimagines the story of Sampson’s “Chinese experiment” and the effect of the newcomers’ threatening and exotic presence on the New England locals. When Sampson’s wife, Julia, gives birth to a mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novel’s conflicts concerning identity, alienation, and exile.

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