"Attention should be paid to the New York Review of Books' continuing reissues of Georges Simenon. Simenon was legendary both for his literary skill-four or five books every year for 40 years-and his sexual capacity, at least to hear him tell it. What we can speak of with some certainty are the novels, which are tough, rigorously unsentimental and full of rage, duplicity and, occasionally, justice. Simenon's tone and dispassionate examination of humanity was echoed by Patricia Highsmith, who dispensed with the justice. So far, the Review has published "Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Red Lights, Dirty Snow "and "Three Bedrooms in Manhattan"; "The Strangers in the House" comes out in November. Try one, and you'll want to read more." -"The Palm Beach Post"
"What many regard as the finest of all noir novels..."--Tim Rutten, "The Los Angeles Times
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""Dirty Snow" is an astonishing work....a bleak masterpiece, its darkness is as William T. Vollmann writes in a pe

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Liege, Belgium. In 1923 he moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful author of pulp fiction. 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. He wrote nearly two hundred books under his own name and became the worldwide best-selling. Marc Romano is a writer living in New York City. Louise Varese (1891-1989) was an American biographer and translator, and was married to composer Edgard Varese. William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of many works of fiction, long and short, including The Royal Family, You Bright and Risen Angels, Whores for Gloria, and The Rainbow Stories, as well as an ongoing series of seven novels, collectively entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, about the collision between the native populations of North America and their colonizers and oppressors. (Four volumes have been published so far: The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, and The Rifles.) Vollmann has also written two works of non-fiction: An Afghanistan Picture Show, which describes his crossing into Afghanistan with a group of Islamic commandos in 1982, and Rising Up and Rising Down, a treatise on violence. He lives in California.