Karen Bernardo

Almost everything you read in the StoryBites archive was written by Karen Bernardo. This page is for her.

Karen was a writer, editor, and former librarian who spent years doing something quietly generous: she sat down with the short stories that students were assigned but that nobody else online had bothered to explain, and she explained them. Not in bullet points, but in real essays, with a thesis and a point of view. If you searched for a thoughtful reading of an obscure story by Isaac Babel, William Dean Howells, Cynthia Ozick, or Tadeusz Borowski, hers was often the only one on the open web, and it was good enough that universities, teachers, and even her competitors cited it as a source.

Then her site went dark. A technical failure took the pages down, and over time those readings began to disappear from the internet, surviving only in the Internet Archive. Links that scholars and teachers had pointed at her work started to break. A body of careful, original criticism was quietly slipping away.

StoryBites exists, in large part, to make sure that did not happen. We have recovered Karen’s complete catalog of analyses from the Wayback Machine and preserved every one of them here, in full, clearly credited to her, and kept non-commercial. Her work is the Memorial Archive, and it sits alongside our newer study tools rather than being replaced by them. Where a story she wrote about also gets a modern breakdown, the two live side by side, and hers is always credited.

Karen has passed, but her literary spirit does not have to. Rather than tear her work down and build something completely new in its place, we chose to keep part of it alive: her readings stay here, in her own words, and our newer tools have grown up around them rather than over them.

We did not know Karen. We came to her work the way her readers always did: by needing to understand a story and finding that she already had. Preserving it is the smallest way we can say thank you.

Karen’s family published a full obituary, which we link to here in her honor: Read Karen Bernardo’s obituary at the Press & Sun-Bulletin →

If you are a member of Karen’s family or estate and would like anything changed or removed, please write to us at hello@storybites.com.