His books include The Genizah (2024), A Wolf by the Ears, Wandering Souls, Marble Mountain, War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, Rumors and Stones, Crossover, Lost Armies, The Extras, and Us.
Karlin attended White Plains High School, in New York and then served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1963 to 1967,[1] when he was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant.
He retired as Professor Emeritus from the College of Southern Maryland,[2] where he taught for over thirty years.
That series includes The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (1995), which he co-edited with Lê Minh Khuê and Truong Lu; The Stars, The Earth, The River: Short Fiction by Lê Minh Khuê (1997); Behind the Red Mist: Fiction by Hồ Anh Thái (1998); Against the Flood, a novel by Ma Văn Kháng (2000); Past Continuous, a novel by Nguyễn Khải (2001); The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories by Đoàn Lê; (2005), Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Viet Nam, co-edited with Hồ Anh Thái (2003), An Insignificant Family, by Dạ Ngân (2009), and Apocalypse Bell, by Hồ Anh Thái (2012), published by the Texas Tech University Press.
Karlin also adapted and edited In Whose Eyes, the memoir of the Vietnamese filmmaker Karlin was one of the script writers and served as a technical consultant and acted in the feature film Song of the Stork,[3] a Vietnamese–Singaporean co-production, which won awards at several film festivals in Europe and Asia.