mourning customs to architecture. She describes herself as a lapsed Dickensian and as someone who has had a different career every decade. Her work life began with a Ph.D. dissertation about Dickens and Christmas, but she quickly left the academic world for successive careers at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer; at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail as the arts and books editor; and most recently as a full-time writer.
[ Q&A with Katherine Ashenburg]
Ashenburg's new novel is Her Turn. In it, Liz, a divorced newspaper editor, finds her tidy life overturned when the woman now married to Liz’s ex-husband submits a personal essay to the column Liz edits. Wife #2 has no idea that she is sending her essay to Wife #1, and Liz decides to keep that a secret, with surprising results. Elizabeth Renzetti writes of it, “It is infused with the joyful spirit of Nora Ephron and lit with a charm all its own.”
At Electric Lit Ashenburg tagged seven funny novels about journalists chasing stories and uncovering intrigue, including:
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. NaipaulRead about another entry on the list.
Mohun Biswas works for the Trinidad Sentinel for a third of his life, evolving as a journalist in tandem with the paper’s transformations. At first, Biswas fits in easily at an unambitious paper that aimsto shock and frighten, writing stories about dead babies in brown paper packages and a series about the tallest, shortest, fattest, thinnest, and wickedest Trinidadians. When the Sentinel pivots to greater seriousness (their new motto: “Don’t be bright, just get it right”), so does Mr. Biswas. His vocabulary and the length of his sentences grow, and he becomes a feature writer and later, as the Sentinel’s colonial optimism wanes, the paper’s expert on social welfare. When he dies, he hopes the headline will be “Roving Reporter Passes On.” But fittingly, the Sentinel writes finis to a life of many disappointments and some joys with the bald “Journalist Dies Suddenly.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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