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Author photo by Rosson Crow
Karolina Waclawiak is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Life Events, The Invaders, and How to Get Into the Twin Palms.
The 2015 short film she co-wrote with Rosson Crow, Madame Psychosis Holds a Séance, was exhibited at the Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. AWOL, a feature she co-wrote with Deb Shoval, premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and has received praise from The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Marie Claire, and more.
Waclawiak was most recently the Editor in Chief of Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News. Previously, she was the Executive Editor of Culture for BuzzFeed News and Deputy Editor of The Believer magazine. Work she has edited has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards, received a number of prestigious awards, and been selected for the Best American Essays anthology series. She has served as executive producer on a number of documentary projects, both produced and currently in development.
Karolina received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, VQR, the Believer, Hazlitt, and other publications. Her name is pronounced Karo-leena Vahts-lah-viak and she is repped by Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit and CAA.
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Life Events is now available from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Order a copy here.
“Waclawiak accomplishes a brilliant feat here, creating an atmosphere of almost palpable, effortful dullness that presides over the entire novel. With so much opportunity for raw emotion, the author seems to avoid it at all cost, going for exceptional clarity instead.” Read the New York Times Book Review.
Read an excerpt at The Cut.
For the LA Times, Karolina was profiled by Stuart Miller.
For the Believer Magazine, Karolina spoke to Hayden Bennett about why we try to organize our lives not to feel pain.
For LitHub, Karolina spoke to Laura van den Berg about characters facing middle age and the necessity to change your life.
For Bomb Magazine, Karolina spoke to Diane Cook about Life Events, pre-grieving, and the desert.
For Hazlitt, Karolina spoke to Sarah Black McCulloch about the way we think about death in America.
For BuzzFeed News, Karolina wrote a personal essay about the loss of her mother, immigration, and grief.
Life Events has been included in the Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2020, BuzzFeed Books Best Books of the Summer, AV Club’s books to read in July, Bitch Media’s books feminists should read in July, and more.
Praise for Life Events
“Brilliant and exhilarating. Every page of Life Events shines with insight, feeling, and astonishing candor, and not a sentence rings false. I love this novel.” —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“A masterwork of grief and loss, living and dying, feeling trapped and becoming free. This transcendent novel braided the numbness and hope of everyday living into a lifeline that pulled me through each mesmerizing chapter.” — Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
“Every page of this novel is a point of no return; once you’ve read Karolina Waclawiak’s Life Events, you will never see life, death, grief, and healing the same way. Waclawiak’s mesmerizing storytelling, both painfully funny and joyfully despairing, immediately grabs hold of you and takes you on a ride. And this highway has no exits.” — Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives
“In this exquisite novel, Karolina Waclawiak rightfully recasts the American West as the territory of wandering dreams and dreamers and the land where this life and the improbable afterlife most often collide. Life Events is a deeply moving meditation on death and the dying, the fierce weight of marriage and family, and the unrelenting absurdity of being alive.” ― Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora
"Karolina Waclawiak is one of our best writers alive today and in Life Events, she gives us the first great book of 21st century grief. It’s a fast and dark and funny book. In Waclawiak’s hands we can peer into the afterlife (or lack of one) and whisper, Oh wow!" — Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and Crapalachia
"Life Events is a hypnotic novel that beautifully grapples with fundamental questions about how to die and how to live. Karolina Waclawiak transports the reader into the streets of Los Angeles, the deserts of the southwest, the apartments of the dying, and a woman's life at a moment of profound change. Filled with compelling, provocative details about the work of "exit guides" for terminally ill people, Life Events is both a mid-life bildungsroman and a meditation on self-determination. I can't stop thinking about this novel." — Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
"Richly symbolic and undeniably haunting . . . [an] atmospheric novel of emotional despair and existential dread . . . there is much to applaud in the manner in which [Waclawiak's] heroine honestly assesses her limitations and acknowledges her pain." — Booklist
“Waclawiak pivots from the coastal Connecticut setting of The Invaders for a bleak, atmospheric foray through the deserts and valleys around Los Angeles...Waclawiak maintains a gloomy tone through well-observed details of the landscape which mixes well with Evelyn’s wry irreverence. This doesn’t promise answers, nor does it give any, and it’s better for it." — Publishers Weekly
[M]oves at a meditative pace. What makes [Life Events] engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition...Contemplative and complex. — Kirkus Reviews
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HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS
"Just as Anya reinvents herself, Waclawiak's novel (her first) reinvents the immigration story... At its most illuminating, How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke."
- New York Times Book Review
"How to Get Into the Twin Palms presents a vividly drawn portrait of Los Angeles inhabited by alienated immigrants, Russian Gangsters, and sex-starved bingo-addicted octogenarians - all enveloped by smoldering fires that threaten to burn the city down." - Poets & Writers 2012 First Fiction
"Not only is How to Get into the Twin Palms about the overwhelming state that is displacement, it's about what happens when loneliness becomes unbearable. Waclawiak writes through these tensions so elegantly, so tenderly, that How to Get Into the Twin Palms is, by far, one of my favorite books this year." - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
THE INVADERS
"Cheryl is both devious and complicated... Her interloper perspective allows for bold reflections—knowing that she 'could have ended up somewhere where people had good reason to be unhappy.'" - The New Yorker
"John Cheever and John Updike were once the rulers of American suburban fiction; in Bullet Park, The Swimmer and Couples they outlined a portrait of the middlebrow milquetoast within the post-60s New Left. Waclawiak writes of the suburban rituals of status and boredom with the same acuity for detail as those writers, but the domestic setting she creates around Cheryl and Teddy is a thoroughly post-millennial world, the kind prophesied by Jean Baudrillard when he quipped, 'What do we do after the orgy?'" - The Guardian
“The Invaders is a gut punch of a novel—a scathing look at privileged people trapped by their own choices, but unable to imagine an alternative to their misery. Karolina Waclawiak is a remarkable writer, able to channel the unflinching clarity of Richard Yates, the off-kilter tenderness of Cheever, and taut narrative energy of crime fiction in a voice that is all her own.” - Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers and Little Children