Reading 'Ghost Waltz' and 'Nine and a Half Weeks' side by side, Day's vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding - be it her lover's effortless domineering humiliation or her parents' shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler's deep-seated Nazi ties.
— Sarah Weinman
In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada's federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.
The interior nature of 'Basic Black' is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children.
Artists, in theory, should not be limited to their personal experience, culture, identity, and worldview. But they must also accept that the degree of difficulty in imagining beyond their own borders is steep, and the failure rate is high.
Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'
I studied voice and piano fairly seriously during my elementary and high school days, and as such, I became very attuned to rhythm and cadence and voice.
Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.
Sue Grafton's 'A Is for Alibi', the 1982 novel that introduced the world to private detective Kinsey Millhone, wasn't seen as the pioneering achievement we now know it to be.
What I learned in school made me a better journalist and a better writer because forensic science is, as scientific disciplines must be, about critical thinking and objective analysis.
Alan Jay Lerner needed a hit. The Broadway lyricist and librettist was a decade removed from his greatest successes when his partnership with composer Frederick Loewe produced something approaching unholy alchemy.
As his celebrity grew in stature, as he transformed from line cook to chef at Les Halles and further high-grade Manhattan restaurants to charismatic television star, I kept hoping - foolishly, perhaps - that Bourdain might return to his first writing love, to the books he wrote and published when his audience was smaller but still devoted.
I've waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, 'Third Class Superhero.'
Vera Caspary wrote an essay called 'My 'Laura' and Otto's' where she talks about the arguments she had with Preminger. She felt that not only did he misunderstand the character but that he couldn't help but be misogynist.
As an inveterate lover of mystery, cracking the code of a writer's true identity has the same effect, for me, as tasting forbidden fruit.
'Basic Black with Pearls', upon its publication in 1980, was greeted with a mix of praise and misunderstanding. Critics sensed its daring and applauded its formal inventiveness, but those qualities also kept people at bay.
When I first read Helen Weinzweig's 'Basic Black with Pearls' several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then, I've described the book to others as an 'interior feminist espionage novel.'
Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.
I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.
I think I always gravitated more toward psychological studies and how people behave in a variety of circumstances. Most of the stories that I tell tend to feature women who get caught up in certain situations - end up in some calamity or other.
Authors don't tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey's first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of 'B Is for Burglar.'
Ultimately, bridging the practice of forensic science and the public's need for story may be difficult. We crave narrative, order from chaos, a mystery solved, good guys winning out over the bad ones. But science, and forensic science, should be more neutral and, thus, more nuanced.
After so many attempts to mount a musical version of 'Lolita,' the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief among those relieved: Vladimir Nabokov.
In 'A Bone in the Throat,' he describes his protagonist and alter ego, the cook Tommy Pagano, as 'darker, and not as tall as the chef, his hair stood up straight and spiky like a young Trotsky's.' He describes Little Italy with such verve, such flavor, that it is impossible not to smell the streets or taste the food.
Most people will pay tribute to Anthony Bourdain as a chef, as the author of 'Kitchen Confidential,' and as the host of several food and travel shows - most recently, 'Parts Unknown' on CNN.
I first read 'Lolita' when I was 16, which I think is a little bit young. But it was a thrilling and disturbing read because it was the first time I really sensed that you could have an unreliable narrator, that you didn't have to sort of tell the truth in a narrative, that there could be something deeper and richer and more complicated going on.
'Laura' was overtly political for sure. Caspary was trying to make a point about women and independence and how men viewed them, with derision or condescension or on a pedestal, when the real person was ignored.
Like so many other bored teens, I was a bored teen with a hobby. The only difference was mine was obsessing about crime.
'Basic Black with Pearls' contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.
When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes.
Nabokov began writing 'Lolita' before he ever knew of Florence 'Sally' Horner, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped from Camden, New Jersey, in the summer of 1948.
I've tried to slow this down but realized that my natural reading rhythm is freakishly fast when an author friend asked me to go through the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book for continuity errors.
I was pretty serious about pursuing forensic science as a profession. In fact, I pursued an internship at the office of the chief medical examiner here in New York.
The quality I appreciated most about Grafton was her loyalty. She stuck with 'Kinsey Millhone' and the alphabet series conceit for her entire career but did not allow herself to stagnate as a writer. Kinsey's first-person narrative gradually made room for other, third-person perspectives.
True-crime shows and podcasts aren't the only ones flattening the complexity of forensic science into easy-to-grasp narratives: journalists do so, too. They say DNA or trace evidence 'matches' a suspect, when scientists can't be so definitive.
The Boston run of 'Lolita, My Love' ended after a mere nine performances - though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.
Five years before 'Kitchen Confidential' - and before then, the 'New Yorker' essay that led to the book - Bourdain published 'A Bone in the Throat,' a crime novel set in the restaurant world he lived and breathed.
Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.'
A lot of the major players in the 1960s were the same as the 1940s and 1950s - Hitchen's 'Sleep with Slander.' Armstong's 'Lemon in the Basket,' which is a fusion of the political assassination thriller and a family drama. And Hughes's 'The Expendable Man.'
In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, 'The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,' talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.
