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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's fiction has appeared in Salamander, Ninth Letter, The Common, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She originally hails from Rhode Island and lives in Brooklyn with her spouse. Glassworks is her first novel.
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's website
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Can you talk a little bit about the real glassworks that inspired you to write the novel?
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father-and-son team of Czech glass artisans who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making costume jewelry, laboratory equipment, glass eyes, and (most famously) incredibly detailed botanical and marine invertebrate models. You're just as likely to run across the Blaschkas in a science museum as in an art museum—the best-known collection of their work is the Glass Flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. There's a persistent caginess to any explanation of the Blaschkas' techniques, how exactly these models came to be. When asked about the source of their skill, Leopold's advice was to "get a good great-grandfather who loved glass"—a glib aside, minimizing their mythic talent as well as five generations of family legacy. Though I can't relate to the particular circumstances, in general this impulse resonated with me: some things feel too important to address in any form but a joke. Glassworks ended up being a fictional biography not of the Blaschkas but of the glass models themselves, which felt so alive and compelling and winkingly mysterious that they ...
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of&#... (more)
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Sebastian Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 and was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday ... (more)
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