Background
Katharine Weber was born on November 12, 1955 in New York City, United States. She is the daughter of Sidney and Andrea Warburg Kaufman. Her maternal grandmother was composer Kay Swift and her grandfather was banker James Warburg.
(By the time she dies at age 106, Esther Gottesfeld, the l...)
By the time she dies at age 106, Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, has told the story of that day many times. But her own role remains mysterious: How did she survive? Are the gaps in her story just common mistakes, or has she concealed a secret over the years? As her granddaughter seeks the real story in the present day, a zealous feminist historian bears down on her with her own set of conclusions, and Esther's voice vies with theirs to reveal the full meaning of the tragedy. A brilliant chronicle of the event that stood for ninety years as New York's most violent disaster, Triangle forces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312426143/?tag=2022091-20
(The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her...)
The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of the renowned Warburg family, from her great-great-uncle, the eccentric art historian Aby Warburg, whose madness inspired modern theories of iconography, to her great-grandfather Paul M. Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve System whose unheeded warnings about the stock-market crash of 1929 made him “the Cassandra of Wall Street.” As she throws new light on her beloved grandmother’s life and many amours, Weber also considers the role the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg played in her family history, along with the ways the Warburg family has been as celebrated for its accomplishments as it has been vilified over the years by countless conspiracy theorists (from Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan), who labeled Paul Warburg the ringleader of the so-called international Jewish banking conspiracy. Her mother, Andrea Swift Warburg, married Sidney Kaufman, but their unlikely union, Weber believes, was a direct consequence of George Gershwin’s looming presence in the Warburg family. A notorious womanizer, Weber’s father was a peripatetic filmmaker who made propaganda and training films for the OSS during World War II before producing the first movie with smells, the regrettable flop that was AromaRama. He was as much an enigma to his daughter as he was to the FBI, which had him under surveillance for more than forty years, and even noted Katharine’s birth in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. Colorful, evocative, insightful, and very funny, The Memory of All That is an enthralling look at a tremendously influential—and highly eccentric—family, as well as a consideration of how their stories, with their myriad layers of truth and fiction, have both provoked and influenced one of our most prodigiously gifted writers. From the Hardcover edition.
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("She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Pa...)
"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers." The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a united Ireland; the art history career that has sustained her since the numbing loss of her daughter; and the arrival of Mickey O'Driscoll, her dangerously charming, young Irish cousin, which has led to her involvement in this high-stakes crime. How her sublime vigil becomes a tale of loss, regret, and transformation is the rest of her story. The silent woman in the priceless painting becomes, for Patricia, a tabula rasa, a presence that at different moments seems to judge, to approve, or to offer wisdom. As Patricia immerses herself in the turbulent passions of her Irish heritage and ponders her aesthetic fidelity to the serene and understated pleasures of Dutch art, she discovers, in her silent communion, a growing awareness of all that has been hidden beneath the surface of her own life. And she discovers that she possesses the knowledge of what she must do to preserve the things she values most. From the Hardcover edition.
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(“Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet ...)
“Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart.”―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage “Rich and compelling . . . Her characters are vividly, achingly real, including the tiny, furry one at the novel’s center.”―Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.” Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey―a tufted capuchin named Ottoline―to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough? Katharine Weber is a masterful observer of humanity, and Still Life with Monkey, full of tenderness and melancholy, explores the conflict between the will to live and the desire to die.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158988129X/?tag=2022091-20
(A delightfully clever contemporary novel inspired by the ...)
A delightfully clever contemporary novel inspired by the Louisa May Alcott classic In Katharine Weber's third novel, The Little Women, three adolescent sisters--Meg, Jo and Amy--are shocked when they discover their mother's affair, but are truly devastated by their father's apparently easy forgiveness of her. Shattered by their parents' failure to live up to the moral standards and values of the family, the two younger sisters leave New York (and their private school) and move to Meg's apartment in New Haven, where Meg is a junior at Yale. They enroll in the local inner-city public high school, and, divorced from their parents, they try to make a life with Meg as their surrogate mother. Written in the form of an autobiographical novel by Joanna, the middle sister, the pages of The Little Women are punctuated by comments from the "real" Meg and Amy. Their notes and Jo's replies form a second narrative, as they argue about the "truth" of the novel. Why do readers insist on searching for the autobiographical elements of fiction? When does a novelist go too far in mulching actual experience for a novel? What rights, if any, does a writer have to grant the people in her life and story? An ingenious combination of classic storytelling in a contemporary mode, The Little Women confirms Katharine Weber's reputation as a writer who "astutely explores the gap between perception and reality." (The New York Times Book Review) A delightfully clever contemporary novel inspired by the Louisa May Alcott classic In Katharine Weber's third novel, The Little Women, three adolescent sisters--Meg, Jo and Amy--are shocked when they discover their mother's affair, but are truly devastated by their father's apparently easy forgiveness of her. Shattered by their parents' failure to live up to the moral standards and values of the family, the two younger sisters leave New York (and their private school) and move to Meg's apartment in New Haven, where Meg is a junior at Yale. They enroll in the local inner-city public high school, and, divorced from their parents, they try to make a life with Meg as their surrogate mother. Written in the form of an autobiographical novel by Joanna, the middle sister, the pages of The Little Women are punctuated by comments from the "real" Meg and Amy. Their notes and Jo's replies form a second narrative, as they argue about the "truth" of the novel. Why do readers insist on searching for the autobiographical elements of fiction? When does a novelist go too far in mulching actual experience for a novel? What rights, if any, does a writer have to grant the people in her life and story? An ingenious combination of classic storytelling in a contemporary mode, The Little Women confirms Katharine Weber's reputation as a writer who "astutely explores the gap between perception and reality." (The New York Times Book Review)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374189595/?tag=2022091-20
Katharine Weber was born on November 12, 1955 in New York City, United States. She is the daughter of Sidney and Andrea Warburg Kaufman. Her maternal grandmother was composer Kay Swift and her grandfather was banker James Warburg.
Weber graduated from the New School for Social Research in 1976, as well as from the Yale College in 1984.
Weber began her career in 1975, when she became an editorial assistant at Harper & Row. That same year she held the position of in-house editor at Richard Meier and Partners Architects. Next year she moved to the American Institute of Graphic Arts to serve as an assistant to director. Weber worked as an archivist at Josef Albers Foundation for 5 years from 1976. During 1985-87 she was a weekly columnist at the company Sunday New Haven Register. At the organization Publishers Weekly she worked at the position of a weekly fiction reviewer from 1988 till 1992. She was a founding member of Residents for Rural Roads and served there during 1980-1984. Weber also served at the Fairfield University as a guest speaker for 2 years from 1988. At Mattatuck Community College she held the post of a teacher in 1992. In addition, Weber was a trustee at the organization Kay Swift Memorial Trust from 1995, as well as a visiting writer in residence at Connecticut College from 1996 to 1997. She was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in 1997.
In 2004 Weber worked as an artistic advisor for a restoration recording project with the non-profit label PS Classics which resulted in the release of a CD of the complete score, with Broadway performers and an orchestra conducted by Aaron Gandy, of the 1930 hit Broadway musical Fine and Dandy.
In 2012 she was appointed for five-years to the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Nowadays Weber is an Editor at Large at The Kenyon Review, and served as final judge for the Kenyon Review 2013 and 2014 Short Fiction Contests.
She is also on the Editorial Advisory Board of American Imago.
(A delightfully clever contemporary novel inspired by the ...)
(By the time she dies at age 106, Esther Gottesfeld, the l...)
("She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Pa...)
(Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with i...)
(Harriet Rose, 26, is an American photographer just winnin...)
(The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her...)
(“Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet ...)
Quotations:
“I have rarely done things in the usual order. I have no high school diploma, having left after eleventh grade to attend The New School, when I was sixteen, and I have no college degree, though several years of part-time college at The New School and Yale. One way of thinking about this as an asset rather than a liability is to consider my education as being an ongoing activity rather than something that has been completed."
“Though I worked as a journalist and critic for several years, my fiction was never published anywhere until a story of mine was selected off the slush pile for publication in New Yorker in January of 1993. That story was to form part of my first novel.
“I tell this story to encourage all unpublished fiction writers. It can happen."
Weber is a member of National Book Critics Circle, Authors Guild and PEN.
Weber married Nicholas Fox Weber on September 19, 1976. They have 2 children - Lucy Swift and Charlotte Fox.