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What Inspired a Prize-Winning International Best-Seller

The House on Moon Lake

Francesca Duranti shares, with us, her inspiration for her book – The House on Moon Lake.

I wanted to create a bizarre, paradoxical atmosphere, first by placing a character halfway between a dream and reality.  To achieve this purpose, my protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone had to be born rich but impoverished, born talented but unable to use his talent, to fall in love, but be unable to enjoy his love story, born in sunny Italy, but sunk deeply in German  literature, fascinated with a woman who takes him captive but horrified by her, too. And lastly, Moon Lake, so neat and tidy and pristine, became the setting for something horrible to happen. In short, I wanted to show the dark shadow behind things.

Francesca Duranti

Meeting Lee Krasner, the artist who inspired Modern Art

Modern Art - A Novel inspired by the life of Lee KrasnerWhen 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).

Do You Use Your Acquired Writing Skills?

Helen Yglesias and some thoughts on acquired writing skills.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.

The author was certainly like this. Although I was not the acquiring editor of her book, I did have the opportunity of meeting with Yglesias several times and was struck by her lively opinions and, to be honest, her irascible nature that had very little patience for what she saw as artificial or watered-down. One striking comment she made was about creative writing programs, which many English departments rely upon to bring in necessary revenue. “You do get a few good writers out of these programs,” Yglesias said, “but they are in the slim minority in compared to how many writers graduate from these programs every year.” Of the rest of the MFA writers Yglesias felt much of the prose she read that came out of creative writing programs was similar, smooth, competent but unremarkable. She went on to say that originality and authenticity are not learned but acquired by living and experience, which no creative writing program can teach.

We lost Yglesias several years after we published her novel but are happy to keep her work alive both in paperback and in an e-book.

The Memoir – Why I Like Them

Memoir is to contemporary reading as reality TV is to contemporary television. Neither the publishing industry nor the television industry can survive without them. The difference between the two trends, however, is quality. While it is generally agreed that reality TV will never rise to the level of good, series television, memoir at its best can be as good as the best fiction. And yet, more often than not it isn’t.

That is why, as a reader, I don’t generally pick up a memoir nearly as often as I pick up a novel.

As an editor, however, I find myself acquiring memoirs like One of These Things First by Steven Gaines. What drew me to make this acquisition? When I read Gaines’ account of a suicide attempt at the age of fifteen that is subsequently followed by a stay in a psychiatric hospital populated by great personalities and celebrities, I kept thinking “no one else could have written this book. I’ve read nothing like this before.”

My taste in memoir is influenced by perhaps the greatest memoir ever written: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, an account of the author’s childhood in Russia. The attention to detail in this book and the descriptions of Russia in the early years of the 20th century are remarkably vivid. I would attribute this to Nabokov’s photographic memory; he was also born a synesthesiac, a person who instinctively associates color to sound. Add to this the fact that, after writing nine novels in Russian, Nabokov began writing in an English idiosyncratically influenced by his native Russian.

Being a foreigner like Nabokov and living in a world whose language is not your original tongue is what lends originality to She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons, a memoir that we will publish in November. Kathleen Hill lived in Africa and in France as a teacher of English. During her stay, she read the literature native to each region, her reading experience distilled through her life experience. The last chapter of her book describes what many avid readers might consider the ultimate experience: the author read the six volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past aloud to another writer whose failing sight made listening to literature the only option.

There are many memoirs published about alcohol and drug addiction, the complexities of marriage, unhappy childhoods. I tend to steer clear of these because the market is glutted with them. I believe it’s difficult to find a new perspective on subjects that have been written about so extensively. Novels that deal with these subjects are harder to sell and to me, this is the proof that the subjects, themselves are shopworn.

There is one memoir that I read again and again: A Guard Within by Sarah Ferguson, a long letter from a woman to her psychiatrist. What keeps me hooked in the plaintive voice of the author. A voice full of passion and pain and wholly unusual due to the fact that shortly after the author finished writing it, she committed suicide. Perhaps what makes this book so original is the author knew she was close to death but, unlike the memoirs of those dying from disease, she had the choice to keep living. Sad as this may sound, I find this memoir uplifting.

Good memoirs are, indeed out there; you just have to look a bit harder to find them. If you have a favorite memoir, tell us about it in a tweet: @delphbks

Also, consider following us on Twitter as we post items on books and authors that we feel are very interesting, educational, and enjoyable,

Writing The Rabbi in the Attic

The Rabbi in the Attic by Eileen PollackGiven 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.)

As to the collection’s title story, I got the idea when I was sitting on my uncle’s porch, listening to the older men who ran our synagogue lament the fact that the overly zealous rabbi they had just fired refused to move out of the attic of the house that came with the job. Maybe, my uncle mused, if they hired a new rabbi, they could tell him that he could only live in the house if he managed to talk his predecessor out of the attic.

If you are a writer listening to such a conversation, you know you have the plot of the story. And if you hear that phrase, “the rabbi in the attic,” you know you have a title. More than that, I knew I had a theme. As someone who had grown up in a semi-Orthodox family but who had since broken away to become a liberal feminist, I knew that I was constantly trying to dislodge the Orthodox rabbi who kept nattering away in my own attic. I also knew that many of my friends had similarly strict, old-fashioned and judgmental rabbis, priests, ministers, upright Baptist aunts and grandmothers in their heads, criticizing their every move. (I am happy to say that some of my most enthusiastic fan mail has come from Unitarian ministers.)

Next year, I have a new novel coming out … THE BIBLE OF DIRTY JOKES, also set at a hotel in the Catskills (as well as a casino in Las Vegas). If you want to get a head start on that one, if you want to know what it was really like to grow up in the Borscht Belt, you can do worse than start with the stories in THE RABBI IN THE ATTIC.

Eileen Pollack

The True Story of the Only Mass Escape from a WWII Concentration Camp

A Story of Heroic Achievement by Richard Rashke

Book on SobiborOn October 14, l943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with buried anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it to safety in the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the war.

In this fully updated edition of the book, Escape from Sobibor, Richard Rashke tells their stories, based on interviews with eighteen of the survivors living in the United States, Israel, Poland, and Brazil. He not only vividly describes the biggest prisoner escape of World War II, he also delves deep into the hearts and souls of those survivors.

Translated into eleven languages and made into a movie, Escape from Sobibor is a story of unimaginable cruelty and the power of unbridled hatred. But it is also a story of courage and a fierce desire to live and to tell the world what truly went on behind those barbed wire fences. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, “a memorable and moving saga, full of anguish, a reminder never to forget.” Given the widespread hatred and anti-Semitism sweeping across America today, Escape from Sobibor remains highly relevant.

Richard Rashke is also the award-winning author of The Killing of Karen Silkwood; Useful Enemies: America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals; Whistleblower’s Dilemma: Edward Snowden, Karen Silkwood and their Quest for the Truth; and the Sobibor-related play Dear Esther.

Purchase - Escape from Sobibor at Amazon