Audrey Niffenegger (More Notes)

Major/Minor Works

The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

The Three Incestuous Sisters (2005), graphic novel (aka, "novel in pictures")

The Adventuress (2006), graphic novel

(Her Fearful Symmetry)

(novella: The Chinchilla Girl in Exile)

"The Night Bookmobile" (Zoetrope All-Story, Vol 8 No 4, Winter 2004)

--also from Book Browse:

• The Spinster, The Murderer, Spring, and The Aberrant Abecedarium

Short Stories / Illustrations

• Prudence: A Cautionary Tale for Picky Eaters (Sherwin Beach Press)

With 100,000 copies in print, The Time Traveler's Wife "is far and away our biggest seller ever," Mitchell said, topping MacAdam/Cage's previous bestselling title, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by about 40,000 copies. While The Time Traveler's Wife had "lots of early buzz," the novel's big break came when Scott Turow chose it as the Today Show's book club selection on September 17. ... The title has been on both the PW and New York Times bestseller lists and it hit the Book Sense list October 12 in the number 4 spot.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA330218.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_4_33/ai_n16108129

The Three Incestuous Sisters

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2006 by Jen Thomas (review?)

She went with independent publisher MacAdam/Cage, who paid the largest advance in their history to outbid New York houses.

http://www.gaugestudios.com/trabajar/professional/gravity/issue04/inorbit_time.php

"Being a visual artist helps me to imagine the things I write about. It's easy for me to look at people, places, objects in my head."

Loaded Shelf

http://kingdomrpg.com/page.php?8

"How much are art and writing alike for you? Are there similar principals or processes? Can you learn about one by dabbling in the other?

A: For me they are connected by narrative. I am interested in telling stories both pictorially and with words. I am always trying to make them converge; someday I will probably end up doing comics, which are the perfect form for that. I learned about long-form narrative by working on my visual books, and it was very helpful to have done those before beginning TTW."

"I’ve read that movie rights were picked up even before a publisher signed the book. Were you shocked that Hollywood came a-knocking?"

Writer Unboxed,

http://writerunboxed.com/2006/03/10/interview-audrey-niffenegger/

"Audrey Niffenegger is a writer, artist, and professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. ...'I teach writing to visual artists. We concentrate on merging and combining text and images, by means of artist's books, comics, installations, etc. I also teach letterpress printing, lithography, intaglio, fine edition book making, a seminar on visual narrative, and the occasional drawing class.'" Flanagan interview

"As a writer (and a reader), my influences are Richard Powers, Dorothy Sayers, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, David Foster Wallace, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice. I'm not claiming that I write like any of these authors-only that I admire them, and think about their work." Flanagan interview

"Was there a central theme that you wanted readers to grasp?

AN: I wanted people to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us. I wanted to write about waiting, but since waiting is essentially a negative (time spent in the absence of something) I wrote about all the things that happen around the waiting." Fl. Int.

"Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago. She is a full time professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production. Her amusements include collecting taxidermy and reading comic books." Book Browse

"I'm 39 years old, and I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first suburb north of Chicago. I'm a spinster (albeit a spinster with a permanent boyfriend) and I live in a white stucco bungalow with my cats, Muybridge and Claudine. I've been writing since I was a tiny child, and I always made pictures to go with the words.

I have received lots of help from Ragdale Foundation; I have been a Ragdale Fellow nine times. The Time Traveler's Wife was also supported by the Illinois Arts Council, which gave me a Fellowship in Prose in 2000. I got my MFA from Northwestern University in 1991, and my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985.

My writing has been published in Bust, The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry, and Electronic Book Review. My art is in the collections of the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Temple University, among others.

I wanted to write a book about waiting.

The Time Traveler's Wife is dedicated to my maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Norbert Tamandl. My grandfather died very young, and very suddenly, of a brain tumor. I never met him. My grandmother never remarried. By all accounts, my grandparents were very happy together. My grandmother outlived her husband by almost thirty years.

I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple. The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story." Book Browse

Previous Publications and Awards

Visual Books

• The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters: novel-length visual books
• The Spinster, The Murderer, Spring, and The Aberrant Abecedarium

Short Stories / Illustrations

• Prudence: A Cautionary Tale for Picky Eaters (Sherwin Beach Press)

-- Book Browse

"Audrey Niffenegger (born June 13, 1963 in South Haven, Michigan) is a writer and artist. She is also a professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.

Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), was a national bestseller. The Time Traveler's Wife is an unconventional love story that centers on a man with a strange genetic disorder that causes him to unpredictably time-travel and his wife, an artist, who has to cope with his constant absence. The film version is due for release in 2008.

She has also written a graphic novel, or "novel in pictures" as Niffenegger calls it, called The Three Incestuous Sisters. This book tells the story of three unusual sisters who live in a seaside house. Because of the artwork and mood, the book has been compared to the work of Edward Gorey.

Another graphic novel, The Adventuress, was released in September 1, 2006. She is currently working on another novel called Her Fearful Symmetry."

-- WP

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