Nina Siegal

‘A Little Trouble with the Facts’ is now available in French. That’s: ‘Une petite entorse à la vérité.’ So much better than the Dutch title. And a nice cover, too. Check it out from Marabout. 

A fun photo shoot: This month, Esta magazine in Holland is running a five-page spread featuring new women authors who write in a noir style. We all had to “become” our characters for a day, choose a scene from the novel, and play the role of our protagonist. It was fun to get made up as Valerie Vane, and the results were surprisingly Marilyn-esque. You won’t recognize me (except, maybe in the tiny thumb-nail image of my “before” shot on the last page), but it’s fun to look at anyway. Unfortunately, you can’t find the images online, but you can find Esta magazine in any Dutch news shop.

Hey, what are you going to do — it’s a different language. Stuff falls through the cracks.

The Dutch version of my novel, which strangely has an English title — but not my title — is about to be published in Holland. They’re calling it Up & Down, which makes no sense to me, and it’s being classified as “chick noir,” apparently a new genre of literary fiction. HarperCollins, my US publisher, has the foreign rights to the book and sold the Dutch rights without retaining any control over title (supposedly this is typical in the business) so my vigorous protests went unheeded.

In any case, the publishing house, Truth & Dare, has done great publicity for the book so far, and I think the chick noir thing is kind of fun, though I’d probably prefer something like “dame noir” or “broad noir,” since I’ve never thought calling women “chicks” was very flattering or progressive.

The daily Dutch newspaper, De Pers (The Press) ran an interview with me on Tuesday. The very friendly reporter did a nice job with the piece, though he called my book “chick lit” — the fault of the publicity materials, no doubt — and he also said my favorite teacher was John Irving, though John Irving was never my teacher. I did mention, however that Irving had come to give a special seminar and workshop at Iowa, which was very inspiring. To be fair, the reporter gave me a chance to fix the errors, but I wasn’t able to check the Dutch translation in time. The main gist of the story is that I like to get feedback from other writers while I’m working on a book, which was certainly true for my first novel. I haven’t shown my new book to too many people, but I am looking to organize a writing group in Amsterdam for the support and feedback. The headline for the piece, Ik Heb Enthousiaste Meeleezers, means essentially, “I need to have enthusiastic readers.”

The bloggers are reporting back on A LITTLE TROUBLE WITH THE FACTS. Here are some reviews we’ve found online:

Nanners and Noodles notes, “I may have stumbled upon a gem of a book with A Little Trouble With The Facts by Nina Siegal.” She goes on to quote from the Publishers’ Weekly review. When last we checked, she was 60 pages in and “loving every bit of it.”

Bohemian Flophouse says, “What’s best about Nina Siegal’s art world novel is the dialogue – modern Valerie Vane talks sharp and slick like women in classic noir mystery books – think Lauren Bacall in those Bogey films.” Bohemian Flophouse just doesn’t like the cover of the book.

Ms. Frizzle is “thinking of reading 5-6 books that sold well, are on the smarter end of the spectrum writing-wise, and that are set in different worlds (ie, I don’t want to read only about women who work in fashion),” so she’s reading A LITTLE TROUBLE and finds it “hilarious” so far. She’s looking for other titles, too.

FuseAction, who heard the reading at KGB in New York, says on his MySpace page, “Siegal has put her newspaper experience to good use in what sounds like a delightful romp of a murder mystery.”

Tulipgirl says she read LITTLE TROUBLE from cover to cover in a single day.

Amy Belk, my best buddy, had really sweet things to say about the experience of coming to Amsterdam for my book launch: “I recommend the experience of standing in line for the autograph of someone you know and love. I think maybe we should do that for each other more often. Blush a little, hold out your newly purchased copy: um, please make it out to your friend, your fan…” Amy’s got a gorgeous Flickr page. I dare anyone to look at it and not fall in love with Amy.

My friend Corbin Collins blogged the Amsterdam book launch event at the American Book Center. See his contribution on Earth Goat.

My brother took this photo of the fiction section at Borders in New York. The two weeks of readings is up and I have to say I’m glad, at least I don’t have to overcome stage-fright on a daily basis for a while, which is nice. Back to my private scribblings. How can I thank everyone for coming out for the readings — especially all the wonderful old friends I haven’t seen in so long? All I can say is I’m amazingly grateful to feel lots of support and love.