Triangle

Marion Ettlinger

Katharine Weber is the author of the novels The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Her paternal grandmother finished buttonholes for the Triangle Waist Company in 1909.

Additional Praise for Triangle

“A haunting exercise in memory…Every narrator in Triangle is unreliable, yet we believe the lot of them.”

—New York

“At its sharpest, Triangle affirms the often tricky relationship between fact and fiction and the subjectivity of all human experience.”

—USA Today

“Katharine Weber excels at a kind of fully realized, three-dimensional fiction. Her characters live, breathe, and inhabit very convincing spaces…. Highly readable and even rather haunting.”

—The Christian Science Monitor

“Triangle is a marvel of ingenuity, bridging history and imagination, astonishing musical inventiveness and genuine social tragedy. It is a wide-awake novel as powerful as it is persuasive, probing and capturing human verities.”

—Cynthia Ozick, author of Heir to the Glimmering World

“Weber persuades us to go along with her by sheer storytelling ability.”

—Newsday

“History itself is the puzzler in Triangle, Katharine Weber’s ingenious take on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire.”

—Vogue

“Katharine Weber has always been a brilliant and ingenious formalist; at last she has found a subject deep and durable enough to bear the jeweled precision of her gaze. Here one of our most irresistible writers meets one of the most immovable events of our history. Triangle is an incandescent novel.”

—Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Stone That the Builder Refused

“Weber’s fascinating, fictional account of the Triangle fire is an intriguing approach to the story of a tragic event that ingeniously supplements the many true reports and that enriches our understanding of what happened on that fateful day in 1911.”

—The National Jewish Post & Opinion

“Slippery as an unreliable witness, Triangle maps the gap between memory and history. Out of the most unlikely materials, Katharine Weber has fashioned a generational mystery that plays as both academic farce and real-life tragedy.”

—Stewart O’Nan, author of The Good Wife

“An enticing read.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Fascinating…Triangle provides important reflection on the power of stories, the shaping of history.”

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Beautiful and haunting.”

—The Hartford Courant

“Weber demonstrates her deep understanding of her characters in this beautiful novel.”

—Library Journal

“‘No ideas but in things,’ as William Carlos Williams said. In Triangle, the things, and the story they tell, are enough.”

—Forward

“Triangle is a finely written contemplation of love, memory, terror, music, and DNA. Precise and clear-eyed, the novel examines the power of recollection in surviving overwhelming tragedy with both pathos and humanity.”

—Barbara Chase-Riboud, author of Hottentot Venus

“Blending music and memory together in arresting arrangement, Triangle is a unique and poignant tale of the varieties of love and loss.”

—Rebecca Goldstein, author of Mazel and The Mind-Body Problem

In memory of my grandmothers:
Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman (1887–1969), who finished
buttonholes at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909,
and Kay Swift (1897–1993), who made wonderful music