Jane Austen Book Club Guff

Some inspiration for us:

The Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler

From the Jacket

Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun.
Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.
Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.


Reviews

Kirkus Reviews - Bright, engaging, dexterous literary entertainment for everyone, though with many special treats and pleasures for Janeites.

Booklist - Donna Seaman. Fowler, a captivating and good-hearted satirist, exuberantly pays homage to and matches wits with Jane Austen in her most pleasurable novel to date by portraying six irresistible Californians who meet once a month to discuss Austen's six novels. Fellow Austenites will love Fowler's fluency in the great novelist's work; every reader will relish Fowler's own ebullient comedy of manners, and who knows how many book clubs will be inspired by this charming paean to books and readers.

BookPage - Though Fowler takes Austen as her inspiration, she clearly possesses her own unique voice and gift for storytelling.

San Francisco Chronicle - Karen Joy Fowler deserves every success this savvy, episodic but chamois-smooth novel can bring.

Time Out New York - Fowler has fashioned a deft, witty multiple-character study and closely observed comedy of romantic manners.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - What results is Fowler's shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don't have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. At the end are plot synopses of all six Austen novels for the benefit of the forgetful, the uninitiated or the nostalgic.

The Washington Post - It's just as hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged.

The New York Times Book Review - What strikes one first is the voice robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected.

The New York Times - The thoughts are more than literary discussion. They bring out the characters and emotions of the participants along with the tensions and sympathies that flit and filter among them. Ms. Fowler has the genial notion to see in the book club — that newish American cultural phenomenon — a society resembling nothing so much as one of those sets of country gentry among which Austen constructed a social comedy where irony stiffens sentiment, and pain is a cool afterthought.


Karen Joy Fowler Biography

Karen Joy Fowler was born in February 1950 in Bloomington, Indiana where her father was a professor of psychology. She says "Bloomington lives in my mind as a sort of Oz-like place where I caught fireflies and watched lightning and ran around. None of the yards were fenced, so we could play games that covered massive amounts of territory." When she was 11 her family moved to Palo Alto, California.

She majored in political science at the University of California at Berkeley and her first baby at twenty-three during the last year of her master's program (at the University of Davis). After completing her master degree she entered what she refers to as her 'child-rearing years' - until the age of 30 when she started to feel restless and took a dance class to reclaim some space for herself - as she says 'it was only after I realized that I wasn't going to make it as a dancer that I took a creative writing class in Davis."

She started to publish science fiction stories and made herself a name in the sci-fi community with the publication of Artificial Things (short stories). This was followed by the novels, Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season.

In 1991, with sci-fi writer Pat Murphy, she created the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award which, to quote Fowler, 'is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender...both to honor Alice Sheldon [the science fiction author who used the pen name James Tiptree] and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more livable sexual roles for ourselves.'

Karen lives in Davis and writes full time. Her most recent book, The Jane Austin Book Club, was published in 2004.