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Karen Palmer

Karen Palmer is the author of the novels Border Dogs (Soho, 2002) and All Saints (Soho, 1997). She has received an NEA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, and her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Five Points, Arts & Letters, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

Author

Birds of Paradise

Summer 2022 | Fiction

There is no work for Logan, not today, not in this L.A. neighborhood where he’s been wandering for hours. Since the riots began he’s steered clear of the Boulevard, wary of the Guardsmen stationed outside CVS, of the rivers of broken glass and blocks of boarded-up storefronts splashed with angry graffiti.

Illustration by Thomas Allen

The Reader Is the Protagonist

Spring 2016 | Memoir

The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear.