While not visibly SFnal in itself, the story is in conversation with one of the great short stories of the genre, James Tiptree Jr’s “The Women Men Don’t See”. Despite this it won a Nebula award in 2003. This story about a group of people on a gorilla hunt in the 1920s does not on the surface show allegiance to any particular genre. The title story, “What I Didn’t See”, was published in 2002. However, while it would be reductive to say that literature is Fowler’s subject, this is a frequently recurring thread that is useful to hang on to. So it’s unsurprising that they don’t immediately form a unified collection. Most of the stories in this collection have been published elsewhere, with the oldest (“The Dark”) first published in 1991 and the most recent (“Halfway People”) in 2010. What I Didn’t See is a collection of Karen Joy Fowler’s short stories, the first such collection since 1997’s Black Glass. Sarah Canary, her first book, seems to change genre with each person who discusses it. The Case of the Imaginary Detective, also published as Wit’s End, is a crime novel about crime novels. The Jane Austen Book Club, for which she is chiefly known (it spent quite some time on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a movie in 2007) is an engagement with the modern romance genre as well as Austen’s novels. If there is one thing that is obvious from Karen Joy Fowler’s work to date, it is that she likes books.
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