Books

The memoir of Leon Fleisher, the brilliant pianist who at the height of his career lost the use of his right hand; reinvented himself as a teacher and conductor; and finally, after thirty years, got his hand back.  I've collected additional material about Leon at the link below. 

This book fell into my lap, and while I was initially worried it might ruin my reputation, I had a lot of fun writing it with Luciano Pavarotti's infamous manager, Herbert Breslin, and I still think it's a good read for opera-lovers. Because of it, I often get consulted about people's Pavarotti projects, which is how I ended up in Ron Howard's film "Pavarotti."

To accompany Reuben Cox's beautiful photographs of a place that is special to me, I joined Thomas Meyer in contributing an essay about the sometime residence of the poet Jonathan Williams, a 17th-century cottage in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. 

I was very pleased to write the epilogue to Andy Martrich's wonderful, inventive book about the eminently quirky Jargon Society, told through the books it didn't publish rather than the ones it did.   

Thomas Meyer's libretto/poem The Turing Opera is a radiant delight. It was an honor to write the introduction to this beautiful book. 

Classical music writers don't always get a chance to play in this arena, so I was flattered when my piece on big voices in opera was included in this engaging compendium. See "Selected Articles" for a link to the piece itself. 

For several years, my main source of income was translating and writing travel guidebooks. I oversaw translations of more than 25 of them, and wrote a few myself. Someone once said to me that I was unlike other travel guidebook writers she knew because I actually went to the places I was writing about.