Center for Fiction

Fiction Talks – Jonathan Santlofer Interview

In the latest latest episode of Fiction Talks, Jonathan Santlofer, a widely acclaimed author and beloved teacher at The Center, talks to Noreen Tomassi, our executive director, about his new memoir THE WIDOWER’S NOTEBOOK. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY hails the book as “a quiet stunner of a memoir… the book never loses momentum, thanks in large part to his vivid writing. This is a tender, moving, and resonant account of how life continues whether one wants it to or not.”

Catching Up & Going Ape

Dear friends, It’s been a long time since I have written anything on my website and I apologize. It was a necessary break for personal reasons. But I have been working and will tell you just a few of things I’ve been up to. For the moment I have put aside the book I’d been working on for well over a year, a story about a cop who lost his family, a novel based in part on “Crime & Punishment.” The book was finished but not resolved and it needed time to percolate, so hopefully it’s doing just that while I work on other things. I’ve been thinking… That people often say a writer’s characters are variations of his or herself and I used to agree. Now, I’m not so sure. One’s art—writing, painting, music—is of course always a reflection of the person who made it. But the characters one creates on the page can … Read more

Mary Higgins Clark Interviewed by Jonathan Santlofer at the Center for Fiction

Mary Higgins Clark is smart, funny, down to earth and earthy. When I asked her to speak at Crime Fiction Academy she didn’t hesitate. She contributed a chapter to the serial novel I put together for Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, “Inherit the Dead” and was never a diva, though she could have been. As you will see in this video, Mary is always Mary.

Linda Fairstein Interviewed by Jonathan Santlofer at the Center for Fiction

Linda Fairstein is one of those people who is so accomplished and so smart she could be intimidating if she were not so damn nice. Her life as a NYC prosecutor informs her novels with a kind of veritas we all wish we had. When she met with the CFA students afterwards, she divulged all sorts of details about her real life cases, her personal life and her writing, much of which is still resonating with me.