March Into Romance: New Releases to Fall in Love With!
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?"