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WORK TITLE: The Winter in Anna
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CITY: Tucson
STATE: AZ
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http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294977241 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/reed-karaim-b5444061/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; one daughter.
EDUCATION:North Dakota State University, B.A. (English and journalism).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Washington journalist for Miami-based Knight-Ridder.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Reed Karaim is a writer and journalist based in Tucson, Arizona. A graduated of North Dakota State University with a degree in English and journalism, he is the author of If Men Were Angels, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection published in 1999. The book, a political drama that explores the tenuous relationship between presidential candidates and reporters, draws to some extent from Karaim’s own experiences covering the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign as a journalist for the Miami-based Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. Karaim’s story pulls the curtain back from the hype broadcast amid hectic campaign schedules to reveal the cynicism and monotony of the relationship between candidates and the reporters who cover them.
In the story, Thomas Crane is a charismatic senator from the Midwest who is running for president. Considered a dark horse, his campaign takes off and presents reporter Cliff O’Connell with an opportunity to be on the ground floor. O’Connell follows Crane across the country as he makes stops and schmoozes with voters. Then O’Connell discovers that parts of Crane’s past that he has made public don’t add up. As O’Connell continues to dig, he is caught in the predicament of how much to reveal. What he learns could have cataclysmic repercussions for his career and for Crane and the nation as well. Complicating matters, O’Connell’s former lover, Robin Winters, is working for the Crane campaign.
O’Connell decides to print the unsavory secret he has uncovered and then stays with the campaign while the public condemns the media’s revelation of information damaging to Crane’s campaign. The moral dilemma is whether journalists, who are supposedly dedicated to telling the truth, should publish everything, even when they harm their subjects. A Kirkus Reviews correspondent summarized the novel as a “bilious fictional examination of the perverse relationship between a presidential candidate too good to be true and a newspaper reporter . . . [with an] uncanny nose for news.” The Kirkus Reviews writer commended Karaim for tackling the question of whether “the electorate, with its need to idolize, and the media, with its need to slay the celebrities it creates, [can] ever grasp the truth about political leaders.” Even though the plot’s foreshadowing tips off readers about the tragic ending, “the writing itself brings to the novel’s melancholy intelligence a kind of worldly, journalistic know-how that rescues the novel from an excess of angst,” said a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.
In 2017, Karaim published The Winter in Anna, a poignant story of loss and love. The book centers on the suicide of Anna, a small-town newspaper photographer, as remembered many years later by Eric, now an older man and a father. Eric flashes back to when he dropped out of college at age twenty and went to work in Shannon, North Dakota, for the town’s newspaper. In that pre-Internet era, he spends hours alone with photographer Anna, who is a few years older than him, laying out the paper and working on local stories. As he gets to know Anna, she reveals her troubled past growing up poor in the Badlands and her abusive marriage. Eric yearns to know how she left her husband and why she has scars on her wrists. He works with Anna for a year, until winter sets in and Anna kills herself.
“Anna is a study in depression and grief, and as the story moves along, the reasons for those dark emotions become starker and deeper,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer. The poignant story finds Eric remembering Anna, what he learned from her, and how his life has changed since those days. “Anna’s story and the mystery of her death are captivating, and Eric’s meditations on the grieving process are wonderfully crafted,” commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “This wise, bittersweet novel of roads taken and not taken . . . plays out against the backdrop of the almost existential emptiness of the Dakota prairies,” remarked Lawrence Rungren in Library Journal. Writing in BookPage, Ian Schwartz observed: “Karaim . . . doesn’t break new ground, but each of his words is impactful and chosen with care. He possesses the subtle, significant ability to build tension slowly and evenly.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of If Men Were Angels, p. 1514; October 15, 2016, Kathy Sexton, review of The Winter in Anna, p. 19.
BookPage, January, 2017, Ian Schwartz, review of The Winter in Anna, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1999, review of If Men Were Angels; November 1, 2016, review of If Men Were Angels.
Library Journal, May 1, 1999, Barbara Conaty, review of If Men Were Angels, p. 110; November 15, 2016, Lawrence Rungren, review of The Winter in Anna, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, March 29, 1999, review of If Men Were Angels, p. 88; October 10, 2016, review of The Winter in Anna, p. 53.
ONLINE
W.W. Norton & Company, http://books.wwnorton.com/ (July 21, 2017), short profile and synopses of If Men Were Angels and The Winter in Anna.
Reed Karaim
Writer, journalist
North Dakota State University
Tucson, Arizona 61 61 connections
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Writer, journalist
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Education
North Dakota State University
North Dakota State University
Degree Name Bachelor’s Degree Field Of Study English and Journalism
Reed Karaim
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Reed Karaim is the author of If Men Were Angels, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and daughter.
The Winter in Anna
Ian Schwartz
BookPage. (Jan. 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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THE WINTER IN ANNA
By Reed Karaim
Norton
$25.95, 256 pages
ISBN 9780393608502
Audio, eBook available
LITERARY FICTION
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Reed Karaim's second novel, The Winter in Anna, is a memorable story of a young man whose life is irrevocably altered by a woman with a tragic past.
Purposeless and confused after his father's stroke, 20-year-old Eric Valery abandons college for a weekly newspaper in tiny Shannon, North Dakota, "where the Midwest becomes the West." When the news editor makes one mistake too many, a reluctant Eric is given control of the paper. He inherits a staff of three, including Anna, a beautiful reporter about 10 years older and a hundred years wiser than Eric. Anna is as scarred by the world as Eric is unmarked. Yet over the course of a year, they become friends and confidants--there is a tangible "will they or won't they" vibe--as Eric tries to make sense of his father's collapse and the guilt he feels. Much more slowly, Anna reveals herself, and in fits and starts we learn about her horrible marriage and the unbearable burden she carries.
It's a foregone conclusion that things won't end well. Narrated by a much older Eric, the novel opens with Anna committing suicide by guzzling a quart of bleach in an anonymous Midwestern motel.
The Winter in Anna is both thoughtful and introspective, in the tradition of Pat Conroy and Ward Just, whose own comingof-age tale, An Unfinished Season, comes to mind while reading this one. Karaim, a freelance writer and author of the well-received political novel If Men Were Angels, doesn't break new ground, but each of his words is impactful and chosen with care. He possesses the subtle, significant ability to build tension slowly and evenly, urging you to devour this smallish novel in one gulp.
Karaim, Reed. The Winter in Anna
Lawrence Rungren
Library Journal. 141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Karaim, Reed. The Winter in Anna. Norton. Jan. 2017.256p. ISBN 9780393608502. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393608519. F
In this quietly powerful novel, Eric Valery, a young college dropout, finds a job as a newspaper editor in a small South Dakota town. He soon meets the newspaper's photographer, Anna, a reserved woman a few years older than he. His year in Shannon, SD, revolves around the reporting of everyday events (and some extraordinary events, including a major flood) and his gradual discovery of Anna's deeply painful secrets, including a youthful marriage gone bad and the loss of a child. Through it all, Eric's affection for the sad yet fiercely determined young woman grows. The story is told by an older, married Eric years later after Anna's suicide. "Haunting" is the word that perhaps best describes this emotionally generous tale. From Anna's memories of loss to Eric's regret over what might have been--and been different for Anna--this wise, bittersweet novel of roads taken and not taken and the consequences of our choices, plays out against the backdrop of the almost existential emptiness of the Dakota prairies--a land as beautiful and unforgiving as life itself. VERDICT This latest from Karaim (If Men Were Angels) will linger long in readers' minds.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Karaim, Reed: THE WINTER IN ANNA
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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Karaim, Reed THE WINTER IN ANNA Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-393-60850-2
A longtime journalist looks back solemnly at his first job and one cryptic woman's influence on him.Ricky, the narrator of Karaim's second novel (If Men Were Angels, 1999), opens this story grimly: he's learned that Anna, a former co-worker, has killed herself by drinking bleach in a motel room. Flash back to young Ricky, fresh out of college and quickly elevated to editor-in-chief of a small-town weekly newspaper in central North Dakota. The job itself isn't especially demanding--he and his small staff cover fires, floods, and festivals, with the occasional dash of mild civic scandal. Anna is the real focus of his investigative skills, a puzzle he can't solve but keeps coming back to: a single mother of two, she delivers the occasional tart line to blunt the young man's arrogance while keeping her past carefully concealed. (Why did she leave her husband? What's with the scars on her wrists?) The two engage in something of a flirtation, but Karaim is careful not to frame this as a love story or even a woman-who-got-away story. Anna is a study in depression and grief, and as the story moves along, the reasons for those dark emotions become starker and deeper. Anna's storm clouds, combined with Karaim's elegant depictions of the wide, empty landscapes on the edge of the Badlands ("the spot in our national geography where the Midwest becomes the West" ), give the novel an overall bittersweet feel--he's elegiac about youth and simpler times for newspapers. But the novel's structure is overly manicured in ways that make its emotional effects seem forced, from the carefully timed reveals of Anna's past to the dry subplots about locals and friends' relationships. Anna's sadness is sympathetically but repetitively handled, leading to a fate whose end we already learned on Page 1. A melancholy, earnest study of friendship.
The Winter in Anna
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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The Winter in Anna. By Reed Karaim. Jan. 2017. 256p. Norton, $25.95 (9780393608502).
Although the main character of Karaim's second novel is a journalist, as in his first novel (If Men Were Angels, 1999), the author takes a departure here from insider politics to character study in small-town North Dakota. Eric has dropped out of college and finds work at the Shannon Sentinel covering local (read: high school) sports teams. There he meets the beautiful, older Anna, who will become his work partner and closest friend. Anna has left a secretive past and an abusive husband behind, things Eric yearns to know about but struggles to understand. He tells the story of their relationship through the eyes of his middle-aged self, after he has learned tragic news that makes him question his actions during the time he knew Anna. The well-drawn secondary characters and the details of working for a newspaper in the halcyon days prior to the Internet round out the novel. Pair this with Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik, another new novel about a young man detailing an early relationship and its long-lasting effects.--Kathy Sexton
Sexton, Kathy
The Winter in Anna
Publishers Weekly. 263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Winter in Anna
Reed Karaim. Norton, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-60850-2
Karaim's (If Men Were Angels) haunting second novel opens with Anna's suicide, an event Eric Valery finds himself returning to as an older man and a new father. He recounts dropping out of college at the age of 20 and moving to Shannon, N.Dak., to work at the Shannon Sentinel, where he meets Anna. The two of them, both editors, spend time alone laying out the newspaper in the pre-Internet days, and Anna begins to share with Eric fragments of her dark past: growing up without money in the badlands, her young marriage going sour, the mysterious scars on her wrists. Readers follow the pair on their small-town reporting adventures--to the dikes during bad floods, to the high school's graduation ceremony, to a sailboat race on the lake--through Eric's yearlong stint in Shannon, watching their friendship deepen and grow stronger, when suddenly, with winter, something changes in Anna. Though the prose occasionally falters, Anna's story and the mystery of her death are captivating, and Eric's meditations on the grieving process are wonderfully crafted. Eric's journalistic attempt to piece together Anna's story make this a beautiful, touching novel. (Jan.)
If Men Were Angels
Barbara Conaty
Library Journal. 124.8 (May 1, 1999): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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* Karaim, Reed. If Men Were Angels. Norton. May 1999. c.320p. ISBN 0-393-04780-6. $24.95. F
In the name of troth, journalists pursue every secret, invade every corner, and publish so that the public can know the simple facts and decide the truth for themselves. With this standard firmly in hand, a young reporter follows a distinguished senator who is making a presidential bid. Sharing an interest in Civil War history, the two connect as the campaign unfolds. Soon, though, a niggling inconsistency begins to prey on the reporter's mind. With his feelings complicated by the presence of an ex-lover working as an adviser to the candidate, the reporter teases out a distant fact whose truth is proved by a teenager with a face much like the candidate's own. In his first novel, Karaim delivers a story that is searingly realistic and exquisitely written. A Knight-Ridder journalist who has covered prominent candidates, Karaim reports with laconic veracity about the stress, excitement, and boredom of a campaign. Of the recent crop of Washington novels, this may well be the best. A sure bet for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/99.]--Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
If Men Were Angels
Vanessa Bush
Booklist. 95.16 (Apr. 15, 1999): p1514.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Karaim, Reed. If Men Were Angels. May 1999. 320p. Norton, $24.95 (0-393-04780-6).
Cliff O'Connell gets his first chance at political coverage when his newspaper assigns him to trail the presidential campaign of Thomas Crane, U.S. senator from Illinois, a Democrat whose charisma has taken him a long way from his small-town roots. O'Connell stumbles onto a career-making story when he discovers a secret from Crane's past that could wreck his chances for winning the presidency just as the candidate is pulling ahead in the polls. If O'Connell writes the story, he also risks a fragile second chance with an ex-girlfriend, Robin Winters, who now works for the campaign. Karaim's riveting novel captures the moral struggles of the reporter and, probably, a decent man compelled to cover a youthful error. Karaim, a former political reporter who covered the 1992 presidential election for Knight-Ridder, brings to life the grinding tedium of a campaign, the cynicism of the press, the constant spin tactics of the candidate's staff, and the enduring longing of the American public to believe in the candidates.
IF MEN WERE ANGELS
Publishers Weekly. 246.13 (Mar. 29, 1999): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Reed Karaim. Norton, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 0-393-04780-6
An absorbing political drama about a golden boy presidential candidate and the sympathetic reporter who brings him down, Karaim's debut is certainly timely, and the issues it raises are provocative. The moral lapse--the "sin"--of liberal Illinois congressman Thomas Crane is something that 33-year-old Montanaborn reporter Cliff O'Connell discovers reluctantly, though breaking the story will gain him entree to the privileged Ivy League world of newspaper journalism. Working in Washington, D.C., for a newspaper syndicate based in San Diego, 0,Connell is assigned to cover Crane's campaign; his main worry is that his ex-lover, Robin Winter, is on the staff of the Crane camp. But as the campaign catches fire and O'Connell begins to respect Crane, he uncovers parts of the candidate's past overlooked by other reporters, finally unearthing the potential bombshell. Agonizing over whether to run the story, Cliff makes a personal rather than a professional decision because of something Robin says--and then he must live w ith the consequences. Karaim, who covered the 1992 Democratic campaign for Knight-Ridder, invests the novel with the authoritative details of nonfiction: observations about the nature of journalism, an insider's view of a political organization in the throes of a presidential race; the behavior of the American public when faced with scandal and celebrity. Karaim's attention to the development of O'Connell's character as he faces a serious moral dilemma elevates the novel from legal thriller to psychological drama. As O'Connell feels the pressure of "desperate bargains struck with ourselves and others," the sword of Damocles that's been hanging over this novel finally falls. Indeed, the foreshadowing here is heavy--the narrative conceit is that the reader knows the Thomas Crane story, but not the untold tale of the reporter's struggle--but the writing itself brings to the novel's melancholy intelligence a kind of worldly, journalistic know-how that rescues the novel from an excess of angst. (May)
IF MEN WERE ANGELS
by Reed Karaim
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A bilious fictional examination of the perverse relationship between a presidential candidate too good to be true and a newspaper reporter whose insecurities and uncanny nose for news bring doom and gloom to the campaign trail. Much of this humorless, darkly solemn first novel is evidently based on personal experience: Karaim, a Washington journalist for the Miami-based Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, covered the 1992 Democratic campaign and revels in the cynicism, monotony, lost luggage, and stale odors that envelope a cadre of journalists whose job it is eat, drink, and merrily cling to the candidate’s every word and gesture. Illinois Senator Thomas Hart —Saint Thomas— Crane is as good as they come: an intelligent, sincerely compassionate liberal Democrat who hasn’t forgotten the despair of his lower-class, coal-town upbringing. Terminally brooding journalist Cliff O’Connell, suffers from career burnout (at age 33) and the untimely departure of his lover, Robin Winters, now a strategist in the Crane machine. Though the two meet for some passionate tumbles, Karaim avoids the pot-boiling, bed-hopping high jinks of current political romans Ö clef and instead contrasts Crane’s dogged determination to be the hero the voting public wants with O’Connell’s relentless attempt to find himself in the subject he’s covering. When Crane tells voters that he never lies, the suspicious reporter pokes around the senator’s Illinois hometown and discovers a secret that could ruin him. Despite a teary plea from Robin, O’Connell prints the truth, then masochistically stays with the campaign as public condemnation of Crane slowly simmers into an angry backlash at the news media for revealing an aspect of his character that may not have been so bad after all. Can the electorate, with its need to idolize, and the media, with its need to slay the celebrities it creates, ever grasp the truth about political leaders? Though he ducks the answer with an inevitable—and much too convenient—tragic end, Karaim deserves credit for asking.
Pub Date: May 12th, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04780-6
Page count: 320pp
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 20th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1st, 1999