Karen Thompson Walker
Karen Thompson Walker
The Age of Miracles is the debut novel of American writer Karen Thompson Walker, published in June 2012 by Random House in the United States and Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom. The book chronicles the fictional phenomenon of 'slowing', in which one Earth day takes longer to complete...
ProfessionAuthor
stories sometimes saddest
Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.
scary-stories newspapers ifs
If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.
stories imagine reader
My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.
jobs stories texture
A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
goal way stories
My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.
believe stories way
I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.
best carriers good jobs meaning sentences sound surprise tone
These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.
books combine favorites love sort stylish
The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.
amazing fears future gift influence might time
Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
closets dangerous happened
Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.
sweet children thinking
I'm an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.
book writing feels
I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
morning writing mind
I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.
real worry different
I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.