The New York Times’ By the Book columnist interviewed Sara in 2014. To read the full interview, click here.
The author of the V. I. Warshawski novels, most recently “Critical Mass,” was hugely influenced by “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: “I felt as though I’d fallen into words and wanted to drown in them.”
I’m trying hard to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” but keep returning to fiction. Right now: John Williams’s “Stoner,” Claude Izner’s “Strangled in Paris.”
Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?
I don’t have an all-time favorite. There are books I reread or wish I’d written. I love the Victorians: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, in that order. I loved “Gilead” and “Wolf Hall,” which is a staggering achievement. I reread Barbara Pym and Jane Austen and my old detective favorites when I’m stressed out.