“I like books steeped in the quotidian — details about
work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by
reading ‘Mildred Pierce.’ And I like fiction about money. I wish there were
more novels inspired by the economy, from the micro (Jess Walter’s ‘The
Financial Lives of the Poets’ and Eliot Perlman’s ‘Three Dollars’) to the macro
(John Lanchester’s ‘Capital,’ Adam Haslett’s ‘Union Atlantic’). I am leery of
writers who are too in love with their protagonists and assemble choruses of
secondary characters to sing their praises. She’s so beautiful! She’s so smart!
Nancy Drew is a prime example, but it happens in literary fiction too.”—American
crime fiction writer Laura Lippman, “
Laura Lippman: By the Book,” The
New York Times Book Review, February 16, 2014
(Photo of Laura Lippman taken at the 2015 Library of
Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.)
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