Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Quote of the Day (Laura Lippman, on Fiction Detailed About Work and Place)

“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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