Three Bedrooms In Manhattan

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. He went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life. In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or romans durs—books in which he displays a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating several volumes of memoirs.Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Accursed. She is Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Princeton.
Marc Romano is a writer living in New York City. He has translated two other novels by Georges Simenon, both published by New York Review Books: Dirty Snow (with Louise Varèse) and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (with Lawrence G. Blochman).