Karolina Waclawiak Books in Order

If you want to read in publication order: How to Get into the Twin Palms → The Invaders → Life Events
If you like outsider stories set in California: How to Get into the Twin Palms → Life Events
If you want class tension, marriage cracks, and suburban dread: The Invaders → Life Events
If you want her most reflective book about grief and mortality: Life Events → How to Get into the Twin Palms

Karolina Waclawiak was born in Poland and came to the United States when she was two, after her parents fled Communist Poland. Her family was first sponsored by a Catholic church in San Antonio. Later she grew up in suburban Connecticut, carrying a feeling that shows up again and again in her fiction: being deeply American, but never quite feeling fully inside the culture.

That split sense of belonging is one of her core subjects.

She studied screenwriting at USC and later earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia. She has said screenwriting taught her to finish drafts instead of tinkering forever with first acts. At Columbia, an immigrant literature class helped sharpen her interest in people who came to America as children. Living near the Russian neighborhood on Fairfax in Los Angeles gave her the spark for her first novel.

That book, How to Get into the Twin Palms, arrived in 2012. Its heroine, Anya, is a young Polish immigrant in Los Angeles who tries to pass as Russian and becomes obsessed with a nightclub across from her apartment. Readers tend to remember the heat, the loneliness, the dark humor, and the way the city feels almost singed around the edges.

Her next novel, The Invaders, came out in 2015 and heads to the Connecticut shoreline. Cheryl, a country club wife who still feels like an outsider, and her drifting stepson Teddy move through a bad summer of class tension, family strain, and gathering weather. It is a lean, unsettling book about privilege and the stories people tell themselves to stay in place.

Waclawiak likes messy women, uneasy communities, and characters who are trying very hard to pass.

Life Events, published in 2020, returns to California and goes straight at death anxiety. Evelyn, the novel's heroine, trains with exit guides and helps terminally ill people die on their own terms while her own life is coming apart. Waclawiak began the book after hearing about that work and later took a death doula course herself. The material was also personal, since she had helped care for her grandfather and was writing while her mother was living with cancer. The novel mixes dread, odd tenderness, desert driving, and a stubborn search for meaning.

Alongside the novels, she has built a career in editing and screen work. She worked at The Believer, later held senior editorial roles at BuzzFeed News, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Hazlitt. She also co-wrote the feature film AWOL, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.

She lives in Los Angeles.

Across her books, the questions stay close to the ground: who gets to belong, what people hide to survive, and what happens when the life you have does not feel like yours. That mix of place, pressure, and inner drift is what keeps drawing readers in.