Jean Zimmerman

Category: The Orphanmaster

  • The Best Vacation

    I came back from Arizona to find that The Orphanmaster had appeared on a Top Holiday Reads 2016 shortlist on line by Co-operative Travel in the UK. The 18 authors included were asked to describe their favorite vacation in 140 characters. What’s funny is I had been spending mine, along with hiking and sunbathing, reading…

  • Kirkus Reviews Savage Girl

    Kirkus Reviews Savage Girl (pub. Feb. 15, 2014): A formal, measured tempo only heightens the tension in Zimmerman’s second historical fiction–cum-thriller (The Orphanmaster, 2012), this one set in the 1870s and concerning a serial killer whose rampage ranges from a rough mining community in Nevada to upper-class Manhattan. The novel opens in 1876 with narrator…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • A Grimm Tale

    Recently I checked out my reader reviews for The Orphanmaster – not always a good thing for a writer to do, but Amazon makes it so easy – and after the wonderful, wonderful, wonderfuls I was stopped short by this extremely erudite criticism: Yick. One of my readers actually had to put the book down…

  • Of Hand Muffs and Weather Masks

    Wenceslas Hollar, the finest etcher and printmaker of the seventeenth century, had a thing about fur hand muffs. He had nearly 3,000 prints to his credit, having fled war-torn central Europe for England in 1636 under the patronage of the Earl of Arundel. The extremely fashionable London lady in Hollar’s “Winter” Dress from 1643-44, in…

  • Hudson River Haunts and Hustlings

    For my whole life I’ve lived up and down the Hudson River, in Hastings, in Ulster Park, in Ossining. New York City crouches on its shoreline, and I lived there for twenty years. The Hudson happens to be my favorite river in the world – although to be precise it is an estuary. I’ve written…

  • The Spirit of Sinterklass

    The Orphanmaster offers a glimpse into Christmas on Manhattan,1660s-style. Or, since the preponderance of colonists hail from the Netherlands, a glimpse into Sinterklass, the Dutch festival of St. Nicholas, which arrives on December 6th. Because we’re talking about The Orphanmaster, everything in this particular holiday season is not all sugar cookies. Here is a passage…

  • Thank You for Reading

    I am thankful. This is a post about this blog. At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken…

  • Dam It All

    Friends in the audience, new and old. We met together upstairs at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, New York. It was a warm autumn day outside, and everything had that sun-burnished appearance. In the middle was a sign that beckoned: come inside, come inside, come inside. Afterwards I wondered just what it was that made…

  • The Golden Notebook in Golden Fall

    Tomorrow will be a perfect day to take in the leaves upstate as they color up. If so much natural beauty wears thin and if you happen to be near Woodstock, New York, consider coming to The Golden Notebook for my 2:00 talk on The Orphanmaster. Signing copies, too. I know there are excellent lattes…

  • Blurbs for The Asylum

    Blue Rider Press has come out with a book trailer featuring fashion insider Simon Doonan talking about getting blurbs for his his forthcoming book The Asylum. There is actually a series of very brief videos, including the blurb one but also one about designer Thom Browne and one about Michael Kors and one featuring “career…

  • Captive Audience

    Millbrook, New York is a quiet town, a town of well-behaved dogs on leashes and potted flowers. A town of rice pudding with cinnamon at a cute bakery called Babette’s Kitchen. The last notable murder in Millbrook took place a century ago – a nanny named Sarah Brymer was strangled when her employers, of the…

  • Il Rituale dei Bambini Perduti

    Italy has weighed in. My Italian publisher’s visual interpretation of the drama of The Orphanmaster is not perhaps what I would have expected. It’s baroque. It’s scary. It’s amazing to think of people sitting down with a copy of Il Rituale dei Bambini Perduti, so far from the island of Manhattan in 1664. If you…

  • Le Maitre des Orphelins in Bookstores

    I opened a plain brown packing box and saw something beautiful. It is so exciting to see The Orphanmaster translated into French, published by the publishing house 10/14. It’s a great company that has introduced such English-speaking authors as Khaled Hosseini, Haruki Murakami, Bret Easton Ellis, Jim Harrison and Colum McCann, not forgetting Nobel laureates…