Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • An Elegant Silhouette

    I saw something intriguing at the Winter Antiques Show. A silhouette, definitely old, refined looking as all such silhouettes are, but somehow mysterious in the way the cut-out man held an unidentifiable object up against his body. It reminded me of the 21st century art of silhouette-artist Kara Walker. Walker has exploded the conventions of…

  • In the Sky With Diamonds

    The 60th anniversary of the Winter Antiques Show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory: the Diamond Jubilee. So it features special showings of diamonds, of course. And a lot of people are dripping with their own, too. One pouf-haired dowager in black stretch pants nearly blinds us with her sizable diamond pendant while scoping out…

  • Feet Ball

    Me and my two feet, my new feet, in sneakers, no boot, no cast and no crutches. On the train to Grand Central Station, New York City. We don’t care about the grey slubs and slabs of ice rimming the river. We don’t care about the Super Bowl madness engorging midtown, a crowd where the…

  • Sweetly Wild

    Animal Planet produced a popular program Raised Wild that profiles people who have been nurtured by monkeys, by a pack of dogs, by a flock of chickens. In researching Savage Girl I came across parental bears and goats and even a girl raised by rats. The mythology goes back to Romulus and Remus, boys suckled…

  • Stop by My Author Page and Say Hi

    My Facebook author page has a brand new cover – it quotes Library Journal saying that Savage Girl is “A fanciful and occasionally surreal take on Gilded Age New York.” And hey, I just reached 100 likes, a figure I’m a little proud of. But I’d like more likes, more! And more visitors. Come see reviews…

  • A Room of One’s Own-Thank You Virginia

    A belated happy birthday to Virginia Woolf (born January 25th), a writer whose fiction I idolized when I was around sixteen. I had the firm conviction that her novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, innovative, modernist, poetic, were about as good as literature got. When I discovered Woolf’s book-length essay A Room of One’s Own,…

  • Wild Peter

    What is it that fascinates people about feral children? As far back as the 1700s men and women went crazy over the idea of an individual who was raised in the wild and then drops in to civilization only later in life. A mute, naked adolescent was discovered by a party of hunters in the…

  • “First to Read” at Penguin

    Please note that the art people at Viking have helped me with a facelift for the site, posting a new Savage Girl banner with a matching background pattern of gleaming orangey rust. Publishing a book is anything but a one-person job. I so appreciate all the help I’ve gotten bringing this novel to the state…

  • The Body Parts of Vesalius

    In Savage Girl, the Harvard student and aspiring anatomist Hugo Delegate spends untold hours over his drawing table, making pictures of whatever body parts he is lucky enough to get ahold of: human bones, hearts, hands, the cerebellum of a child killed tragically in a streetcar accident. The body is a mystery to him, one…

  • Publishers Weekly Interview w/Jean Zimmerman

  • The Power of Words

    Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is an occasion that celebrates among other things the power of words. The man was a Shakespeare for our day. And so I really like this post by someone who talks about how some good novels lead us, as Wordsworth once put it, “toward obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness.” I…

  • Helicopter Meat Loaf

    I always hear people complain about memory loss. Do you forget where you put your keys? That’s how the problem is often phrased. There is an idea that age itself muddies the waters of the brain, causing the things we need to sink. Or maybe it’s your meds, another villain. I always go with the…

  • Bound vs E-Books Revisited

    How many books do you have stacked on your nightstand? Or piled on the bedroom floor, or scattered across the coverlet? Does your coffee table hold bound books or yesterday’s papers or riffled copies of Vanity Fair? Do you tuck a paperback into your bag when you go to wait in the doctor’s office, or…

  • Savage Girl Review in Library Journal

    Woo hoo! This just in, from Library Journal, its Feb. 1 issue: Wealthy socialite Hugo Delegate and his family rescue the “Savage Girl” from a carnival sideshow and bring her back to their mansion in 1870s New York. Reportedly captured as a child and raised by a Comanche tribe, she instantly captivates Hugo with her…

  • Shorpy Higginbotham’s Buckets

    A day before getting my cast cut off my foot (aahhhh…) my cabin fever got the best of me and I made for NYC, to navigate midtown perched on my scooter. The train into town went okay – I watched the gap more zealously than I ever had before – and Maud and I got…