Karen Shepard:
An Empire of Women
Inspired by an actual collection of photographs (Sally Mann's "Immediate Family"), this highly unusual first novel reveals the intricate and strained family relationships between three generations of women. Celine Arneaux is an aging Chinese/European/American photographer made famous by three collections of childhood photographs of her granddaughter. Years later, a proposed retrospective of her work brings grandmother, mother, and daughter together for a week during July 1990, at the Virginia cabin retreat that was the site of Celine's famous photos of Cam. The long-established dynamics between the three women are challenged by the presence of Alice, a six-year-old Chinese girl left in Cam's care when her graduate-school mother returned to China. Shepard's haunting descriptions of the famous photographs, three collections called One, Six, and Twelve (Cam's age when they were taken), convey somewhat mysterious but also revealing and erotic images of young Cam. Equally haunting is the slow revelation of Celine's unpublicized relationship with her Chinese mother.
From Booklist
Karen Shepard's stories have appeared in Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, and Mississippi Review
In 2003 she received the Doris Roberts-William Goyen Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.