Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Mylène Dressler was born in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1963, and – after a career as a professional ballet dancer – began her literary studies at the University of San Francisco, and was later a doctoral student at Rice University. She is the author of three novels, The Medusa Tree, The Deadwood Beetle, and The Floodmakers. Her novels and stories have been translated into French, Dutch and Turkish, and she has been a faculty member or a visiting writer at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Autonomous University of Chiapas, the University of Groningen, Rice University, and the University of St. Thomas, among others.
Dressler’s honors and awards include the Fulbright Fellowship, the Paisano Fellowship in Fiction, and the Fellowship in Writing from the McCullers Center in Columbus, Georgia. She makes her home in Texas and in the canyon country of southern Utah with her husband and two border collies.
From the author's website
Mylene Dressler's website
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How was writing this novel different than writing your first?
I think I can best describe it by saying that writing a first novel feels
like drawing a map to a place you've never seen but are longing to get to, while
writing a second is like standing with that beautiful map in your hands—only
it doesn't describe the new country you're in. All the experience of having made
that first map—of writing—goes with
you, of course, all the gained knowledge of structure and form and character.
But with each new work, the way "through" has to be found all over
again. When I began writing The Deadwood Beetle, for example, I had to
discover almost everything about its setting and characters; I didn't even know,
at first, that the book's narrator, Tristan Martens, would be a specialist in
insects. And this as it turned out exactly mirrored the process I went through
writing my first book: one of beginning with only a voice in my head and the
barest outline of an idea, and then having to thrash my way through.
What research did this novel require? Did it require any, or with some
knowledge of basic historical facts, did the story simply emerge?
Parts of the story emerged from my basic ...
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Ian McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fé... (more)
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