What I learned from Joan Acocella’s review of Paula Fox’s News from the World: Stories and Essays in the New Yorker:

• She is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, all of which were out of print until the mid-90s.
• She is the daughter of an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter and a nineteen-year-old Cuban-American woman
• She wrote the Newbery Award-winning novel The Slave Dancer, which I read in eighth grade, along with 22 other YA novels.
• She experienced a significant literary revival after being praised by Jonathan Franzen in “Perchance to Dream,” a landmark essay on realism versus postmodernism.
• She is the grandmother of Courtney Love.