I am delighted to announce the first full-length biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, a project that has occupied my writing life for the last eight years:

The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychology and Psychoanalysis

and

The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1940-1959: Mind, Medicine and Man

Due out from Routledge in the summer of 2021

 

A profile of the forthcoming biography and a bibliography of  Gregory Zilboorg's work is available here:

 

Gregory Zilboorg: The Biography

The other three interviews

Lottie on my suitcase

Autumn is a time for travelling for me: summers in Brittany are busy with visitors in my rental cottage and frequent guests and family in my own large farm house, so during the warm and sunny months, I tend to stay put.
I am now back from another trip, this time to England to see my two daughters. My six cats are happy to have me home-- Lottie immediate claimed my suitcase even before I fully unpacked it. I can see her now from the desk where I am writing.
When I returned from Italy last month, I promised three more videos, made when there were still leaves on the trees.  Here they finally are:

What were your primary sources?

Can you explain the novel's title?

Does Transgressions take place in Italy?

Video interviews with me: Part 1

In front of the duomo in central Milano

I have just returned from a week in Milano, the financial, fashion and publishing centre of Italy... but of course I went there to visit my eldest son, who lives and works there.
We had a lovely time together and he listened to me talk not only about Transgressions but about what I might write next, asking excellent questions and helping me to begin to crystallize my ideas. There are a number of narratives that tempt me and all involve 'life writing', so I am flirting with history, with time and place and space and the arc that a life or a section of a life might make. But I am not yet sure what to do next; the next project is always, I think, a difficult thing to embrace.
Marketing Transgressions is still the current challenge, and with that in mind, my son and I went to a local park where he kindly made four video interviews-- and here's Part 1:

What prompted you to write Transgressions?

Kindle version now available

The Kindle cover

I couldn't quite believe that the novel actually existed as a real, live e-book until I 'looked inside' on amazon.com and saw the pages turn just like the pages of all those e-books I had looked at online while browsing for something to read.
I had, of course, looked at the e-book version in a number of formats before uploading it: I looked at it in the 'Kindle Previewer' and in 'Kindle for PC' and in 'Mobireader'-- all part of the fascinating, detailed and rather fiddly process of taking the novel I wrote through the required technological hoops. For instance, I edited the final version in Microsoft Word 2010, then had to save it as a document compatible with Word 2003 before saving it as a PDF and finally as a version suitable for more editing in Mobicreator.
I have rather enjoyed the e-journey, though.  I have comforted myself through the inevitable frustrations (and there have been a few) by reminding myself that writing Transgressions was the really hard work and that the whole process will be easier next time....
But the fact is that I  haven't yet written another novel and, by the time I have done, the technology will certainly have changed and I will likely have forgotten my solutions to all the little hiccoughs along the way!
I hope readers will look at the e-book version if only to peep inside and see what the novel feels like.  It's available now at:

http://www.amazon.com/Transgressions-ebook/dp/B005XA5GF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319101078&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transgressions-ebook/dp/B005XA5GF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319112684&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.de/Transgressions-ebook/dp/B005XA5GF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319112814&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.fr/Transgressions-ebook/dp/B005XA5GF6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1319112768&sr=8-5

A print-on-demand paperback will be available for purchase through all amazon sites in a matter of weeks-- editing that version is taking just a bit more time.

A cover at last

The cover

On this late August morning I am in the thick of copy editing and formatting, but it looks as if the cover is nearly finished. The actual colours are more dramatic, warmer and brighter than the picture I'm posting here, but having a professional cover at last certainly does make Transgressions seem like a real book.
 
Covers are a challenge, I've discovered: one wants to get the balance right between simplicity and complexity, between attraction and accuracy. Italy as simultaneously a physical place and an idea-- partly memory, partly an idealized elsewhere-- feels like the right landscape to me, although the novel is also set in London and Paris as well as (somewhat more prosaically) in Pennsylvania and Portsmouth. The poppy also seems right: it's mentioned several times in the novel and hints at the highly sexualized language of flowers used by the two central characters; of course, it also suggests the first World War, an event that looms inevitably over their poetic world.

I am very grateful to Austin Nevin and Serena Martucci di Scarfizzi for their enthusiastic help with the images and design. 

Where I am now

Some of my books on their shelves

I am writing on this sunny July morning here, in my study on the first floor (second floor for American readers) of my large granite farmhouse in Brittany. At my back are the books in the photo: lots and lots and lots of books from my various studies over the years in Wisconsin, Ohio and Cambridge (England).  Any good writer is very likely a reader, too; I am certainly a reader as well as a writer, and wherever I have settled I have had bookshelves-- bricks and boards in the 1970s and mismatched cases in rented houses, but here in France a whole wall of shelves purpose-built for books.  And I've had lots of studies, too: in the corners of bedrooms and living rooms and even one in a converted basement coal room, but here in Brittany I have a large room at the top of the stairs with windows on either side and a desk in the middle-- a perfect place to write.  And so that's what I'm doing this morning: writing this first post, then getting a second cup of coffee and turning my attention to Transgressions, my first novel, which is almost ready for publication.