Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Lawrence Malkin to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
Lawrence Malkin was a prize-winning correspondent and financial writer for Time magazine and The International Herald Tribune in New York, Washington, and Europe. He is the author of The National Debt, which was published in 1987 and foresaw much of what has since come to pass, and Krueger’s Men, the definitive story of history’s greatest fake money swindle, which was translated into eight languages and inspired the Oscar-winning film, The Counterfeiters. As a correspondent, he has reported on wars in Israel and Afghanistan, and his dispatches from London on finance won the Fairchild Prize from The Overseas Press Club. An essay on the cost of health care for the aging was awarded the Greenwall Foundation prize for the best personal essay. He has since edited a dozen financial and political memoirs. Among those with whom he collaborated personally were the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, the long-time Soviet ambassador to Washington, and East Germany's Cold War master spy. He lives in New York City.
Susan Traill is a writer and artist. She reported and wrote for the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the BBC from Brussels, London, and elsewhere around the world. While studying at the London School of Economics, she served as arts editor of the University of London’s student newspaper. She started drawing and writing stories and poems at an early age but ultimately opted for journalism as a less precarious way of earning a living. After graduating from LSE, she was based in Brussels and travelled and reported throughout Europe, and in the Middle East and Africa. She then switched to art and changed pace, completing the illustration course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. She lived in various photogenic areas of Brooklyn and Queens and partied with Wall Street traders, artists and fashionistas. She now lives in Bath, England, where she writes, creates art with paintbrush, pen and camera, and is engaged in civic projects.
Why and How We Wrote “Dancing With Madmen—The Wall Street Novel”
To most people, the world of high finance seems far away and, even to many bankers it is a mystery. How else could they have got themselves into such a twist and run the economy into a ditch? We both had reported on the series of financial upheavals that became increasingly as bankers, traders, and computer geeks were gradually let loose in the 1980s to do their own thing. We realized that and our own reporting and the expert but too-often opaque analysis of the financial crash and its broad implications was not getting through. We decided that fiction could best show how human nature drives these economic upheavals in a way that people could relate to their own lives. These monetary catastrophes are not just huge accidents that no one could have foreseen. They are built into the faulty financial and political architecture that encourages bankers to overreach and politicians to let them get away with it. As the new millennium dawned, prosperity was balanced on a bubble. The politicians soon believed their own spin and declared the good times would keep right on rolling; the world's most powerful central banker even proclaimed a period of economic stability as "The Great Moderation." During that time we began circulating this prescient tale of ambition, chicanery, and financial disaster, memorably dismissed in 2003 by one New York publisher as “not very believable.” No one wanted to challenge the seductive notion of perpetual plenty, and now that has vanished. Now that the entire world is suffering the consequences, it helps to understand how we all got here.
How did we two authors manage to work in harmony on opposite sides of the Atlantic? First we met to imagine an allegory of events using characters drawn from experience , and then we put it all into a story. Then we assigned ourselves different chapters with subjects closest to our own experience and talents. In the digital age, it is not hard for two partners on different continents to work together; moreover, distance provides sharper perspective. We exchanged drafts by e-mail, and by the time we had commented on each other's work (and rewritten all except the most distinctively personal scenes) we had developed our own seamless style. For the most part, we could hardly remember whose lines were originally whose. Let readers now judge whether we succeeded in bringing alive the mysterious world of finance, high and low.
Read more
Read less
