Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber's fiction debut in print, the short story "Friend of the Family," appeared in The New Yorker in January, 1993. Her first novel, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR (of which that story was a chapter), was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1995 and was published in paperback by PicadorUSA in 1996. She was named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996. Her second novel, THE MUSIC LESSON, was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1999, and was published in paperback by PicadorUSA in 2000. THE MUSIC LESSON has been published in eleven foreign languages. THE LITTLE WOMEN was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003 and by PicadorUSA in 2004. All three novels have been named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review. Katharine's fourth novel, TRIANGLE, which takes up the notorious Triangle Waist company factory fire of 1911, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, 2006.

Katharine was born in New York City in 1955. She grew up in Forest Hills Gardens and attended P.S.101, The Kew-Forest School, and Forest Hills High School, which she left after 11th grade in order to attend the inaugural year of the Freshman Year Program at The New School for Social Research (now Lang College at New School University) in 1972. She continued to attend The New School part-time while working as an editorial assistant at Harper & Row, at The American Institute of Graphic Arts, and for the architect Richard Meier, before leaving New York when she married Nicholas Fox Weber in 1976 and moved to Connecticut.

In Connecticut, Katharine worked for the Josef Albers Foundation doing archival research and assisting the artist Anni Albers in various ways. (Nicholas Fox Weber, a cultural historian and author of numerous books, most recently a biography of the painter Balthus, is Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.) Two daughters, Lucy and Charlotte, were born in 1981 and 1983. Katharine attended Yale as a part-time undergraduate from 1982 to 1984. (She has neither a high school diploma nor a college degree.)

Katharine wrote a weekly column for the Sunday New Haven Register from 1985 to 1987. From 1987 to 1989 she was the Books columnist for Connecticut Magazine. From 1988 to 1992 she reviewed literary fiction for Publishers Weekly and wrote numerous author profiles as well. Her book reviews have since appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, The London Review of Books, The Ruminator Review, Washington Post Bookworld, Vogue, and The Readerville Journal.

Katharine's maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift. Since Swift's death in 1993, Katharine has been a Trustee and the Administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the music of Kay Swift. This work includes the first Broadway musical with a score by a woman, "Fine and Dandy," and several popular show tunes of the era, among them "Fine and Dandy" and "Can't We Be Friends?"

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