Sara Paretsky has written nearly 20 books, including 13 titles featuring private detective V.I. Warshawski, whom she introduced in Indemnity Only in 1982. She has won a lifetime achievement award from the British Crime Writers and the best novel award in 2004 (for Blacklist). In 1986, she created Sisters in Crime, devoted to helping female mystery authors, and has won numerous honors for her work on behalf of women and children. She currently works with several literacy and arts organizations; she and her husband live in Chicago. Paretsky's 14th V.I. Warshawski novel, Body Work, was published by Putnam on August 3, 2010.
On your nightstand now:
Jennifer Egan's Goon Squad. Even though I can't keep track of the characters, I think this is an amazing novel. When I'm not reading it, I want to be back in it. Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. I re-read Pym at times of stress--her understated wit and understanding of human foibles helps calm me down. My youngest brother's Ph.D. dissertation. He writes well, but it's economics, which I find a slow go. Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place. Artist Antonia Contro gave it to me to help me think about ways to describe the natural world--it's an unusual and beautiful book. Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street--I'm reading it for the fourth time now--a beautiful book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Little Women and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I had four brothers, and I loved reading about sisters.
Your top five authors:
Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Anna Akhmatova, Charlotte Bronte.
Book you've faked reading:
Oh, a whole bunch. Ulysses--I used to keep trying because A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an important book in my adolescence. Don Quixote. Paradise Lost. I've actually read War and Peace from beginning to end, and it still makes me furious that Natasha, who is brooding and artistic, turns out to have an emotional disease for which pregnancy is the cure.
Book you're an evangelist for:
North and South. I greatly admire Elizabeth Gaskell's work, and think she is in some ways Dickens' superior as a stylist and an observer of social problems. In addition to writing, to raising her six children, and corresponding with leading European scientists and artists, she also worked directly with Manchester's neediest young people on literacy, hygiene, and other social needs. No wonder she died young of a heart attack!
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most of what I buy. The cover art tells me if it's the kind of book I want to read, so I pick it up and read the flap copy and if I'm still hooked, I read the opening paragraph and if that works, I read randomly from the middle, and if the writing seems good, the dialogue authentic, no cheap sentimentality or over-strained metaphors, I'm in.
Book that changed your life:
I live inside my head, in the stories I've been telling myself since I was a small child, so all books change me in some way, but Raymond Chandler literally changed my life because reading his novels made me want to create a woman detective who challenged the noir stereotype of women as virgins, vamps or victims.
Favorite line from a book:
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."--Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell.
Author photo by Steven E. Gross.