Send Me Work

Book excerpt: Winner of 2011 Balcones Fiction Prize The stories in Katherine Karlin's debut collection encompass an unusually broad range of experience - refinery workers mourn a colleague's death; a struggling young woman in post-Katrina New Orleans persuades a welder to teach her his trade; an idealistic aerobics instructor decamps for Nicaragua to pick coffee. In each of these stories, Karlin offers rare insight into the place of work in the lives of women, her narrators keenly observant and attuned the humor arising from the gap between life as they imagine it and as it's really lived. But even more remarkable is the fullness with which she renders characters who, once we meet them, make us wonder how they've escaped the notice of other writers.