Katharine Weber, Award winning author, "Triangle"

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Katharine Weber is the author, most recently, of Triangle, which was longlisted for the 2008 International Dublin Impac Literary Award.

Katharine Weber's favorite books:

1. The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud
   
   
   (health)
   
   "I am deep into Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on The Uncanny, Das Unheimliche -- which translates literally, as "unhomely." He invented this concept as a way of contemplating and understanding those moments when something feels familiar yet foreign or alien at the same time, so the consequent feeling is of something uncomfortably strange. Novelists do well to think about the uncanny."
   
   


2. The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
   
   
   (baby books (Ages 0-3), children books, children books (Ages 4-8))
   
   "I am also reading and rereading Helen Bannerman's 1899 classic for children, The Story of Little Black Sambo. It figures hugely in Temper, my novel in progress, the story of a chocolate candy business."

Katharine Weber - whose novels include "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear," "The Little Women," "The Music Lesson," and most recently, a reimagining of the 1911 shirtwaist factory fire that killed 146, most female workers, "Triangle" - has posted her top ten book list on The Top Ten Blog

1. Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Milhauser
   
   
   (literature and fiction)
   
   


2. Ulysses by James Joyce
   
   
   (literature and fiction, classics)
   
   


3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
   
   
   (literature and fiction, classics)
   
   


4. The Comforters by Muriel Spark
   
   
   (literature and fiction, mystery and thrillers)
   
   


5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
   
   
   (literature and fiction)
   
   


6. The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder
   
   
   (literature and fiction, classics, mystery and thrillers)
   
   


7. Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy
   
   
   (literature and fiction)
   
   


8. The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
   
   
   (classics, literature and fiction)
   
   


9. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
   
   
   (literature and fiction, classics)
   
   


10. Portnoys Complaint by Philip Roth
    
    
    (literature and fiction)
    
    


Source:
http://www.toptenbooks.net

Why should you listen to her?

Katharine Weber’’s fiction debut in print, the short story "Friend of the Family," appeared in The New Yorker in January, 1993. Her first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (of which that story was a chapter), was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1995 and was published in paperback by Picador in 1996. She was named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996. Her second novel, The Music Lesson, was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1999, and was published in paperback by Picador in 2000. The Music Lesson has been published in twelve foreign languages. The Little Women was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003 and by Picador in 2004. All three novels were named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review. Katharine's fourth novel, Triangle, which takes up the notorious Triangle Waist company factory fire of 1911, was published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in 2007 by Picador. Her fifth novel, True Confections, the story of a chocolate candy factory in crisis, will be published in October of 2009 by Shaye Areheart Books. She is under contract with Harmony Books for a memoir about family stories and the narrative impulse, Symptoms of Fiction, which will be published in 2011.

Katharine's maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift. Since Swift's death in 1993, Katharine has been a Trustee and the Administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the music of Kay Swift. This work includes the first Broadway musical with a score by a woman, "Fine and Dandy," and several popular show tunes of the era, among them "Fine and Dandy" and "Can't We Be Friends?"

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