Katharine Weber
Katharine Weber's six novels and memoir, all highly-praised, some, award-winning, have made her a book club favorite.
Her eighth book, JANE OF HEARTS AND OTHER STORIES (Paul Dry Books, March 2022), is a collection of somewhat linked stories and a novella.
Her seventh book, the novel STILL LIFE WITH MONKEY (Paul Dry Books), had rave reviews and praise:
"Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer."―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Katharine Weber's Still Life With Monkey is a beautifully wrought paean of praise for the ordinary pleasures taken for granted by the able-bodied. In precise and often luminous prose, with intelligence and tenderness, Weber's latest novel examines the question of what makes a life worth living."―Washington Post
"[A] deeply but delicately penetrating novel."―New York Times Book Review
"Weber's unsentimental and poignant examination of what does and does not make life worth living is a heartbreaking triumph."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart."―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
Katharine's previous novel, True Confections, the story of a chocolate candy factory in crisis, was published in 2010. Critics raved: "A great American tale" (New York Times Book Review), "Marvelous, a vividly imagined story about love, obsession and betrayal" (Boston Globe), "Katharine Weber is one of the wittiest, most stimulating novelists at work today...wonderful fun and endlessly provocative" (Chicago Tribune),"Succulently inventive" (Washington Post),"Her most delectable novel yet" (L.A. Times).
Her sixth book, a memoir called The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities, published in 2011, won raves from the critics, from Ben Brantley in the New York Times ("Ms. Weber is able to arrange words musically, so that they capture the elusive, unfinished melodies that haunt our memories of childhood") to the Dallas Morning News ("gracefully written, poignant and droll"), the NY Daily News ("Old Scandals, what fun...the core of her tale is that of elegant sin and betrayal"), and the Boston Globe (a masterful memoir of the private world of a very public family"), among others.
Katharine was the Richard L. Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College for seven years. She has taught creative writing at Yale University (for eight years), and was an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the graduate writing program in the School of the Arts at Columbia University for six years. She has taught at various international writing workshops, from the Paris Writers Workshop several summers in a row to the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference and the West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland.
All of Katharine's books have been republished in paperback, some of them in more than one edition, and all are available as e-books. Take note, book groups! In these pandemic times, Zoom visits to book groups can be arranged.
“You might say she feels in italics and thinks in capital letters!”
“Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.”
“I am in awe of the perpetual tumult of the sea. I am moved by the still place on the horizon where the sky begins. I am stirred by the soaring and dipping fields that make the landscape into a rumpled green counterpane. I thought I would never have such powerful feelings again. I thought I would live through the rest of my life having experiences, and thoughts, but I never thought I would again feel deeply-- I was convinced that my wounds had healed and become thick scars, essentially numb.”
“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.”
“The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn't seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those who can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher he was 'half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.' I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean.”
“I do love competence in a man.”