how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve…

My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that…

— Karen Thompson Walker

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“Doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?”

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different -…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out…

— Karen Thompson Walker

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely,…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much…

— Karen Thompson Walker

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination ... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end…

— Karen Thompson Walker

“I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't…

— Karen Thompson Walker

Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling was part…

— Karen Thompson Walker