Katie Hafner

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About Katie Hafner

Katie Hafner was born in Rochester, New York, and has lived in more cities, towns and hamlets than she cares to count. She started writing about technology in 1983, the year the Apple Lisa was introduced. For nearly a decade, she wrote about technology for the The New York Times's Circuits section. She currently writes on healthcare topics for the paper's Science section.

She has also written for Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Esquire, Wired, The New Republic, the Huffington Post and O Magazine. Her sixth book, Mother Daughter Me, a memoir, was published by Random House in July 2013. Her first novel, The Boys, is due out from Spiegel & Grau in July 2022.

Hafner is host and co-executive producer of the podcasts Lost Women of Science and Our Mothers Ourselves. (Photo credit: Christopher Michel)

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Cyberpunk Ourtlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier

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Titles By Katie Hafner

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet Aug 19, 1999

by Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner

( 303 )

$13.99

Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone.
In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.

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The Boys: A Novel Jul 12, 2022

by Katie Hafner

$20.49

"A brilliant, thoughtful novel that comes with perhaps the greatest shocker in recent literature (no spoiler alert). A superb meditation on loneliness and community."—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

"Remarkable …. Starting out as a lighthearted romance before taking an unsettling turn, [The Boys] upends expectations in the best way."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A delicious and smart summer read filled with humor and surprise.

When introverted Ethan Fawcett marries Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. She fills his world with a sense of adventure, expanding his horizons beyond his comfortable routine. Because Ethan fears becoming a father, one day Barb brings home two young brothers, Tommy and Sam, for them to foster, and Ethan immediately falls in love with the two boys. When the pandemic hits, he becomes obsessed with providing a perfect life for them. But instead of bringing Barb and Ethan closer together, the boys become a wedge in their relationship, as Ethan is unable to share with Barb a secret that has been haunting him since childhood. Then Ethan takes Tommy and Sam on a biking trip in Italy, and it becomes clear just how unusual Ethan and his children are. This hauntingly beautiful debut novel—a bold and original high-wire feat—is "a treat with a surprise inside” (Publishers Weekly).

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A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano Jul 15, 2010

by Katie Hafner

( 149 )

$9.99

Glenn Gould was famous for his obsessions: the scarves, sweaters and fingerless gloves that he wore even on the hottest summer days; his deep fear of germs and illness; the odd wooden "pygmy" chair that he carried with him wherever he performed; and his sudden withdrawal from the public stage at the peak of his career. But perhaps Gould's greatest obsession of all was for a particular piano, a Steinway concert grand known as CD318 (C, meaning for the use of Steinway Concert Artists only, and D, denoting it as the largest that Steinway built). A Romance on Three Legs is the story of Gould's love for this piano, from the first moment of discovery, in a Toronto dept. store, to the tragic moment when the piano was dropped and seriously damaged while being transported from a concert overseas. Hafner also introduces us to the world and art of piano tuning, including a central character in Gould's life, the blind tuner Verne Edquist, who lovingly attended to CD318 for more than two decades. We learn how a concert grand is built, and the fascinating story of how Steinway & Sons weathered the war years by supplying materials for the military effort. Indeed, CD318 came very close to ending up as a series of glider parts or, worse, a casket. The book has already been lauded by Kevin Bazzana, author of the definitive Gould biography, who notes that Hafner "has clarified some old mysteries and turned up many fresh details."

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Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir Jul 2, 2013

by Katie Hafner

( 323 )

$8.99

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions.

Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways.

Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay.

How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many.

Praise for Mother Daughter Me

“The most raw, honest and engaging memoir I’ve read in a long time.”—KJ Dell’Antonia, The New York Times

“A brilliant, funny, poignant, and wrenching story of three generations under one roof, unlike anything I have ever read.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

“Weaving past with present, anecdote with analysis, [Katie] Hafner’s riveting account of multigenerational living and mother-daughter frictions, of love and forgiveness, is devoid of self-pity and unafraid of self-blame. . . . [Hafner is] a bright—and appealing—heroine.”—Cathi Hanauer, Elle

“[A] frank and searching account . . . Currents of grief, guilt, longing and forgiveness flow through the compelling narrative.”—Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle

“A touching saga that shines . . . We see how years-old unresolved emotions manifest.”—Lindsay Deutsch, USA Today

“[Hafner’s] memoir shines a light on nurturing deficits repeated through generations and will lead many readers to relive their own struggles with forgiveness.”—Erica Jong, People

“An unusually graceful story, one that balances honesty and tact . . . Hafner narrates the events so adeptly that they feel enlightening.”—Harper’s

“Heartbreakingly honest, yet not without hope and flashes of wry humor.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[An] emotionally raw memoir examining the delicate, inevitable shift from dependence to independence and back again.

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Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier Apr 29, 2016

by Katie Hafner, John Markoff

( 55 )

$7.64

Cyberpunk, originally published in 1991 and considered a timeless classic, explores the exploits of three international computer hackers. Cyberpunk provides a fascinating tour of a bizarre subculture populated by outlaws who penetrate even the most sensitive computer networks. The three hackers profiled are Kevin Mitnick, Robert Tappan Morris (who released the infamous Internet Worm in 1988) and a young German named Pengo who, together with a band of other West Germans, sold purloined data to the KGB.

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Romance en tres patas (Spanish Edition) Feb 2, 2021

by Katie Hafner

( 7 )

$9.99

Esta es una formidable biografía de uno de los pianistas más emblemáticos de la historia: Glenn Gould, y del "dúo dinámico" que lo acompañó: su afinador, el casi ciego y sinestésico Vern Edquist, y su piano, el CD 318, al cual el canadiense dedicó una milimétrica y obsesiva búsqueda, no sin discutir con Edquist, por el sonido perfecto. Gould, un artista que renunció al formato de concierto y se dedicó a realizar grabaciones que se volvieron fundamentales, tuvo una relación fascinante con su piano. Detrás de un gran pianista hay un gran afinador, reza la frase. En el contexto histórico del siglo XX, aquí se recorre la historia de la Steinway & Sons, que tuvo que fabricar féretros durante la Depresión. Este libro también es la biografía de un piano. Este libro, polifónico en muchos sentidos, congrega disciplinas, anécdotas y recorre la historia a través de ellas al tiempo que reflexiona sobre la tensión entre el artista y el medio y abraza al fantasma del clavecín. La investigación de Katie Hafner es fantástica.
"Este libro cuenta la historia de Gould a través de sus obsesiones", The New York Times
"Una biografía bien temperada", Galileu
"Hafner esculpió montañas de investigación", Toronto Star

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