When I got an assignment from a newspaper to interview Lee Krasner, the single thought in my head was that I was about to meet the widow of the great Jackson Pollock. Then I was warned that she would be “difficult,” which I took to mean “nasty”. But when I showed up at her house in East Hampton — the same small house she and Pollock had moved to in the 1940s — the woman I encountered there was anything but mean and hard. I had an overwhelming sense of a fiercely strong human being who had suffered a lot and come through: someone whose integrity, raw hunger for life, and blunt honesty were undimmed at age 72. I walked out of that first meeting on a high, thinking how fortunate Pollock was to have had her for his partner.
The last time I saw her, she invited me to look her up when I was in Manhattan, where she lived for much of the year. I never did that, out of a certain diffidence, a feeling that she must have more important people to see. So when I read, four years later, that she had died, I had a great sense of regret and loss. It was probably that which made me write Modern Art, a novel in which the character based on her, rather than the one based on Pollock, is very much the central figure.
Just as some people found Krasner too much of a tough broad to be likable, some readers didn’t care for Belle Prokoff in my book. But others saw her the way I had experienced Krasner: as a woman who had gained a certain hard-won wisdom, even a spiritual dimension, through the things she had suffered. That is exactly how I tried to present her.
Evelyn Toynton
Read more about the book – Modern Art (click here).
The late Helen Yglesias was 85-years-old when Delphinium published The Girls, her novel about four sisters, all of them over the age of eighty. The presiding theme of her delightful, light-hearted book is that old people don’t necessarily give up their passions and antagonisms. They see themselves as perhaps slowing down but never as old and obsolete.
Given that I grew up at my family’s hotel in the Catskills and THE RABBI IN THE ATTIC was my first published book, it’s not surprising that most of the stories are set there. Woodstock really did happen a few miles from my house. After our hotel was sold, I worked summers at a crazy insurance company processing reports about the accidents that befell the elderly Jewish guests (and young campers) who vacationed in the region. The insurance office was straight out of a Philip Roth novel or a play by David Mamet, but I wanted to look at what it was like to be a young woman in such a crazy, sexy environment. (The experience must have been universal; one of the two stories set at the insurance company, “Neversink,” won a Pushcart Prize.)
On October 14, l943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in 
A young writer trying to finish his first novel has the whole world before him. And this wider world is certainly a contrast to the finite world within his fiction. When I was in my twenties and finishing my first novel, Clara’s Heart, I had no idea how the book would fare; I was, after many attempts, just trying to get the book right. I had a larger-than-life character who seemed to know what she wanted and whose Jamaican patois became poetry whenever she spoke. What Clara said was often as surprising to me as the writer as it became to the many readers who got to know her after the book was published. Clara may have come from a different world and from a different culture, and yet she is probably my greatest fictional creation. She somehow lives more vividly on the page than all the other characters I’ve created whose worlds are arguably much closer to my own.