AWARENESS
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons From the World’s Most Elegant Woman
Reading Karbo is like listening to a dear friend talk about the legendary designer over brunch. This is a fun, insightful look at the genius behind the little black dress.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Anyone with a good sense of humor should hugely enjoy, or should I say enjoie, Karen Karbo’s funny and stylish take on Coco Chanel. Like a little black dress, this handy life guide will take you from day into evening. K.K. on C.C.: oui, oui!
HENRY ALFORD, author of How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They are Still on This Earth)
Karbo delivers a mini-biography, with perceptive and amusing commentary … The fashion is merely fascinating, a means to an end. The life lessons? For a woman trying to find a safe haven in America, this book delivers more wisdom – and wit – per page than Dr. Phil will dispense in a lifetime.
HEADBUTLER
Wise, witty, and refreshingly colloquial, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel is an enchanting tour through the complex, often controversial life of fashion icon Chanel. Filled with relevant life lessons for the modern woman, this book is Karbo at her irrepressible best.
HILARY BLACK, author of The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships
How to Hepburn: Lessons On Living From Kate The Great
Karbo presents all this heterodox advice with great humor, but there’s a point she’s making to sister Gen-Xers: Hepburn broke all the rules women were supposed to follow and still had a fabulous life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These days, women in Hollywood and everywhere else are following [Hepburn’s] fiercely independent lead – and Redbook contributing editor Karen Karbo is no exception. Her sassy new book, How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great explains what we can learn from the iconic leading lady, who makes most of today’s heavy-hitting celebrities look pretty lightweight.
REDBOOK
Karen Karbo’s How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great strides magnificently before our eyes, much as Hepburn did onscreen. Perhaps because Karbo’s mother turned to Hepburn and not Jackie Kennedy as her 1960s household saint, Karbo goes for honesty over hagiography –and still finds much for us to emulate. And Karbo has the same appetite for a good sentence that Hepburn had for life.
MORE
… Captures Hollywood mores and largely succeeds as an homage to “Miss Hepburn.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
In an interesting blend of self-help book and star biography, novelist Karen Karbo seeks to extract lessons from the life of Katherine Hepburn. How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great is a fun and spunky take on the life of the star.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
An exuberant celebration of a great original.
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Karen Karbo manages to come up with some offbeat gems in her witty new book, How to Hepburn.
USA TODAY
…A delightful, insightful little guide.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
…smart, witty and profound in a low-key way – everything you’d expect in a book by Karbo.
THE OREGONIAN
The Stuff of Life
• A New York Times Notable Book
• People Magazine Critics’ Choice
• Books for a Better Life Award finalist
• Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-fiction
With generous honesty, Karbo describes nuanced moments of nearly excruciating tenderness, embarrassment, frustration, and love, balanced with passages of often side-splitting humor. A compulsively readable memoir about family and the writing life.
BOOKLIST
Karen Karbo is nothing if not funny, so you’ll forgive her – no, you’ll thank her – for not turning her chain-smoking father’s death from lung cancer into a Lifetime movie weepfest. Instead, this bittersweet book honestly shows death to be what it is: a part of life, with all its annoyances, inequities, miseries and joys.
PEOPLE
Karbo’s willingness to portray the tough business of grief and mortality in all its unmanageableness and confusion makes The Stuff of Life a book you want to keep reading, and laughing with, to the end.
THE SEATTLE TIMES
…The book works beautifully on many levels. A lively, insightful and astonishingly unsentimental read, it’s intensely funny in places.
THE WASHINGTON POST
The Diamond Lane
• A New York Times Notable Book
A flawless, page-turning story … this is a tale to treasure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wonderfully comic novel about savvy Hollywood outsiders trying to get in … not only is the plot ingenious, but the writing remains deft all the way through.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
It is a testament to Karbo’s skill at high comedy that the ending of this book – a funeral rather than a wedding – leaves you smiling.
THE NEW YORKER
This astringent, humorous novel tackles two subjects ripe for satire: the Hollywood movie industry and marriage – both notoriously fickle institutions requiring blind hope to sustain life.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
This kind of novel is a devil to pull off … and Ms. Karbo has done her job brilliantly.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Trespassers Welcome Here
• A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
• A Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year
The Russians have come – and they’re fascinating. Karbo’s first novel, about Soviet émigrés in L.A., has passionate characters colliding in love, jealousy, politics, and the ongoing cold war between the sexes. An extraordinary debut that combines compassion with raucous comedy.
THE
