Karin Lin-Greenberg Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Karin Lin-Greenberg
Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Redivider, Berkeley Fiction Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Epoch, Shenandoah, The North American Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Story, and Kenyon Review Online.

Karin has previously taught at The College of Wooster, Missouri State University, and Appalachian State University. She received an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.

“Faulty Predictions” won gold in the Short Story category of Foreword Reviews’ INDIE Book of the Year 2014 and the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press. “Vanished” won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction. “Housekeeping”, a short story, won a Pushcart Prize and was listed as a Distinguished Story of 2020 in Best American Short Stories of 2021. Karin was a finalist for a 2018 Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune.

“Faulty Predictions” is a short story collection that was released in 2014. In “Faulty Predictions”, young characters attempt to find their own way in the world and the older characters face their regrets. In “Editorial Decisions”, members of this editorial board of this high school literary magazine witness this unspeakable act of violence. In “A Good Brother”, this sister forces her brother to accompany her to the Running of the Brides at Filene’s Basement. Two grandmas, both of whom are immigrants from China, argue about the value of their treasures at this filming of Antiques Roadshow in a story called “Prized Possessions”. In “Designated Driver”, a city bus driver adopts this pig which has been brought onto the bus by some rowdy college students.

These stories take place in locales that are as diverse as the mountains of western North Carolina, small town Ohio, and the plains of Kansas. Karin provides insight into the human condition over this varied cross section of age, geography, and culture. Even though the characters are often faced with challenges and obstacles, the stories also capture these moments of hope and optimism.

“Vanished” is a short story collection that was released in 2022. “Vanished” tells the stories of girls and women in upstate New York that are typically unseen and overlooked by the people around them. The characters range from this aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she’s got to teach, to this young girl that becomes victim of this cruel prank in a swimming pool. There is also a television producer that regrets allowing her coworkers into her mom’s bird filled home to film this show about animal hoarding since it will reveal way too much about her past and her family.

Empathetic and humorous, this collection exposes the adversity in each of the character’s life; each one dealing with something or somebody that has vanished, a person close to her, a relationship, a friendship. All while she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of such a loss.

“You Are Here” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. While a formerly bustling mall gets ready to close its doors for the last time, the residents of this upstate New York town have to reckon with this shocking act which forces them to reevaluate who they really are in this remarkable study of some ordinary people’s extraordinary inner lives.

The inhabitants of this small town have long since found that their lives intersect at a single focal point: the local shopping mall. However business is down and stores are closing down, and while the institution breathes its final gasp, the folks inside of it dream about something different, something more. In its pages, this novel brings this diverse cast of characters vividly to life, real, flawed, and lovable strangers that make for wonderful company and prove to be unforgettable even after the final store has close up shop.

The one hair stylist at Sunshine Clips watches YouTube primers on how to draw and paint in secret, just as her awkward young son covertly studies new illusions for his own magic act. His magician’s assistant and friend, this high school cashier in the food court, has attracted the unwanted attentions of this strange boy at school. She does not tell anybody except for the mall’s chain bookstore manager, this failed academic that lives in a tiny house that he built in his mother-in-law’s backyard. His family is watched over by this one judgmental old woman that lives next door, whose weekly trips to Sunshine Clips hide this emotional and complex history and are going to spark the very moment when it all changes for everybody.

Exploring how the stories that we all tell ourselves are inextricably connected to the places that we call home, “You Are Here” is this keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of this community in transition. Which ultimately illuminates the magical connections which can bloom from ordinary wonder of our everyday lives.

Karin creates a chorus of characters that are so fully human that they come to feel like your neighbors and friends. In graceful and lucid prose, she is able to illuminate how these lives (brought together in the most banal of locations, an upstate New York shopping mall) touch one another in lasting and unexpected ways. The readers become confidantes to their private fears, hopes, and biases, while watching their intersecting stories blossom into something that is complex, rich, and larger than the sums of their parts.

How can we survive ourselves and one another? How can we thrive rather than just co-exist? Karin brings her imperfect yet perfect cast of characters to answer such a question and shows us a way.

Karin shines her magical light on some ordinary characters whose lives intersect at the local mall (the most ordinary place in America) in order to show just how singular and remarkable these lives actually are. Each and every page carries the writer’s trademark fusion of humor, poignancy, yearning, and insight, along with a powerful reminder about how the seemingly random connections among us can lead to some unexpected grace.