Alan Furst
Alan Furst
Alan Furstis an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 February 1941
CountryUnited States of America
I read very little contemporary anything.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.
I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.