News Archive

What's Donna Tartt Working on Now?

With The Little Friend finally complete, Tartt is now reported to be working on a version of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, due to be published by Canongate as part of a series that will feature updated fables by Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and JM Coetzee.

The Little Friend

The hugely anticipated new novel by the author of The Secret History a best-seller nationwide and around the world, and one of the most astonishing debuts in recent times. Read all about it here.

Read the Prologue.

The Secret History - the movie

Director: Scott Hicks

Screenplay: Christopher Hampton

Runtime: 91 mins

A long-planned film of the book dropped into one of the most protracted developments hells in Hollywood history. The project passed through the indecisive hands of Alan Pakula, Christopher Hampton and Scott Hicks to end up (possibly...) as a Warner-Miramax venture with the sibling duo of Gwyneth Paltrow as producer and Jake Paltrow as director.

- Boyd Tonkin, independent.co.uk, The Secret History: Whatever happened to Donna Tartt?, May 21, 2002

The best-selling Donna Tartt novel The Secret History continues its circuitous path towards the silver screen. Hyphenate Alan J. Pakula was the first to set to work on the project, initially planning to direct it, later merely to produce. His untimely death is but the latest in a series of setbacks for the piece, which has seen drafts by Rafael Yglesias, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and Christopher Hampton. Shine helmer Scott Hicks had expressed some interest in the pic, which tells the chilly tale of five students who are caught in the thrall of a brilliant classics professor, only to accidentally commit a murder while carying out an ancient Greek ritual.

- inhollywood.com, the development report, April 1999

Donna Tartt, on her new novel, tentatively titled "Tribulation", due out early 2002

Excerpt from the interview

"When I was writing this book I was thinking very much about Stevenson, who I love, very much about Treasure Island and the pirates, and you know, Long John Silver, - books that I loved as a child. This is a book about children, but it's not a book for children. It's a frightening book. It's a scary book. It's fairly dark. It's about children coming into contact with adults. It doesn't take place wholly in the world of children (when I say children, I mean twelve years old...) And coming into contact with the world of adults in a very frightening way. (...) It's finished. I'm doing the edits now, the rewriting..." - Donna Tartt

The Secret History of Donna Tartt

by Mark Coles, Arts Correspondent

BBC

April 2001

"...Donna Tartt is preparing her comeback too... She has finished her second novel - well almost - 'I'm editing it down at the moment,' she says.
'It's a book about children - but not for children - its a frightening scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults in a very frightening way'. So why had it taken so long to write? 'I can't write quickly. If I could write a book a year and maintain the same quality I'd be happy. I'd love to write a book a year but I don't think I'd have any fans'. Donna Tartt's new novel - with the provisional title 'Tribulation' is scheduled for publication early next year."

Read it

Whatever Happened to Donna Tartt?

BBC

April 2001

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