Last summer, we threw a party for Kristin Harmel to celebrate the publication of Italian for Beginners, her latest novel. Now, in the latest installment of mediabistro.com’s “Book Keeping” series, Harmel discusses the international aspects of her fiction, from how traveling informs her writing to the reactions of readers outside the United States. “The book that seems to have resonated the most in Russia,” she says by way of example, “is The Blond Theory, which is about a woman who feels like men don’t like her because she’s so successful and intelligent. So she feels like she has to dumb herself down to be appealing to men. I get these emails from Russian readers telling me that this book taught them to feel free to be themselves. That’s really gratifying to me to think that something that I wrote at my dining room table in Orlando, Fla., resonated in St. Petersburg, Russia.”
This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for $55 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.