Bookmarks Magazine

This profile of and interview with Nicole Krauss is from our Nov/Dec 2010 issue.

Writing a novel is a difficult enterprise; starting a new work after a best seller can be particularly daunting. In our interview with Nicole Krauss, the celebrated author of The History of Love ( 4 of 5 Stars Selection July/Aug 2005), we discussed the challenges and origins of her newest novel, Great House (to be reviewed in our next issue). "When I began to write seriously again after The History of Love," Krauss told Bookmarks, "there was a long period of aimless effort, of trying this or that without any sense of where it would lead. Many of the pieces I began I eventually lost interest in--either they reached a dead end, or never really came alive to me. But in all of this material, there were four voices that I fell into just as accidentally as the rest, but unlike those stories, these didn't quickly exhaust themselves. Just the opposite: the more I wrote of them, the more real and vivid they became to me. I threw the rest away, and these four intense monologues or confessions began to expand, each with its own story."