'A place where you live'

 

“I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.” – Nicole Krauss

 

Born in New York City on this date in 1974, Krauss is perhaps best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, although her short fiction has also been widely published in everything from The New Yorker to Best American Short Stories.   Her most recent book is the short story collection How To Be A Man.

 

A writer since childhood, she said “My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.”

Krauss “officially” started writing in her teens and won several undergraduate prizes for her poetry and the Dean's Award for academic achievement while studying at Stanford.  She had her first novel published in 2001 and now has 4 novels (2 adapted into film) that have been translated into 35 languages.

 

“What interests me in writing a novel,” she said, “is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.”