harold goldberg blog - Harold Goldberg

Alert! 3 Events For My Novel, The Skinny

3/29/2026

0 Comments

Here is a list of Upcoming Events that I hope you can attend!

3/25: Microsoft Experience Center, 677 Fifth Avenue, 6 p.m. Reading and interview by Sherri L. Smith
3/29: Reading and Party at 2A (2nd & Avenue A) 4 p.m.
4/8: The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street, Reading And Interview by Luis Aguasvivas, NPR. 6 p.m.
Also, in addition to anywhere online, you can get The Skinny at The Strand Bookstore and McNally Jackson Books.

0 Comments

The Skinny: Video Games That Influenced My Mystery Novel

3/23/2026

0 Comments

Unboxing The Skinny!

3/23/2026

0 Comments

Check out the unboxing of The Skinny here! You can buy it tomorrow here, or anywhere!

0 Comments

In The Skinny, New York Is A Nuanced Main Character

3/14/2026

0 Comments

East River Photo by Harold Goldberg

New York City itself is a dark, moody character in The Skinny, my new novel. While the city is featured in innumerable books, those stories not exactly like the New York about which I’ve written. That’s the beauty of fiction writing. I had a chance to reveal New York in my own way.

I have been chronicling the powerful and the powerless in culture in New York ever since I moved here in the late 1980s. My stories in New York magazine and the Village Voice often featured counter-culture figures: photographers like Ryan Weideman, who sold his photos taken as a taxi driver, and became a well-regarded artist.

When I wrote about The Dark Star Crew, a young person poetry collective which performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café for The Village Voice, I chronicled how they taught their audience about racism as well as poetry. Coffeehouses like Sin-é brought the Irish experience to St. Mark’s Place. Almost off-the-grid collectives, like the Gargoyle Mechanique Laboratory on Avenue B, would sometimes have an LSD-fueled (but brilliant) open mic night.

Sometimes, these creators broke through to the mainstream. Nuyorican Poet Paul Beatty’s novel "Big Bank Take Little Bank" was a literary brilliance, and he now teaches at Columbia University.

Often, they almost broke through. In other words, they had their shots, and those who found them in the East Village were the richer for knowing their art. They all found their niches, but not more without blood, sweat and tears than they should have endured.

And sometimes, they died from drug overdoses. Sometimes, they just moved away, sometimes they lost their minds or just stopped making art, never to be heard from again. And sometimes, they were pushed out to the wilds of Brooklyn by landlords increasing rents. Sometimes, they weren’t artists at all. They were working people, immigrants, trying to cobble together part-time jobs to support themselves or their families.

It’s hard-working people like these that make The Skinny compelling.

But it’s also the places in which they existed in 1990s New York, the bars like Bertha’s Bar, where Stan is lured into working for a wealthy landlord. It’s the strange living conditions of cellar apartments, some of which look like hangouts for the devil himself.

It’s the creepy feeling one gets while standing under The Hanging Tree in Washington Square Park, the deadly allure of the black water estuary in the East River, and the city’s cemeteries at night.

I think New York City, of all cities, is the most wonderfully dark setting in which to create a noir mystery, especially for The Skinny.

0 Comments

The Skinny Mystery: Who Is Charmaine?

3/4/2026

0 Comments

Mia Goth would make a great Charmaine.

In my novel "The Skinny," which sees publication on March 24, one woman is particularly important. When Stan Kaminski makes a deal with a rich landlord to find this missing woman, he essentially has made a deal with the devil.

Charmaine Kazimierz is a brilliant but troubled woman who does not want to be found. In fact, she does not want to leave her apartment. Until recently, she worked as a server at Bertha’s, an East Village bar populated primarily by Polish Americans and immigrants. Some of Charmaine’s coworkers believe she is agoraphobic. She has stopped showing up to work.

It’s Charmaine that you see on the cover of “The Skinny,” moving through the half lit, rainy-swept streets of New York City.

As Stan discovers, there’s so much more to Charmaine than her need to stay inside and remain alone. Bad things have happened to her in the past, things grave and dark.

Charmaine finds it difficult to trust anyone. She wants to find her own way. Inside her soul, she is a strong woman who feels she does not need saving. But she has been daunted, and she has become enmeshed in a web of evil.

Charmaine and Stan explore what acquaintance means, what friendship means, and perhaps what love means. But, at the mystery's conclusion, does Stan really know Charmaine?

If there were to be film version of "The Skinny," Mia Goth would make an excellent Charmaine.

In her role of Elizabeth in Del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” she is not a victim. She is a strong, opinionated woman who pushes back on Victor’s stupidity, madness and egomania. And her varied roles in director Ti West’s “X” horror trilogy, proves she has great range.

Do read "The Skinny" for yourself, and do let me know if I'm right about Mia Goth.

0 Comments

The Skinny Mystery: Who Is Stan Kaminski?

3/2/2026

0 Comments

Mads Mikkelsen, the actor, could conceivably play Stan Kaminski in a movie version of The Skinny.

THE SKINNY, my first novel, will be published on March 24th. It's a dark, moody, noir mystery which primarily takes place in downtown Manhattan, in places like Greenwich Village, the East Village, Chelsea. Portions also take place in Queens, Harlem, Jersey City and The Catskill Mountains.

Thematically, THE SKINNY deals with:

The conflicts that come with change,
How one New York vanishes and another appears to take its place,
How the rich and poor are in a constant battle,
How the addicted mind fights with itself for answers,
Whether true love should be suppressed,
What hope actually means and,
How a mystery is solved only to open the door to another.

Stan Kaminski, the main character, is a down-on-his-luck immigrant living in Astoria. He is trying to live his best humble life and stay out of trouble. This former security guard for 1980s Polish hero Lech Walesa is a wary but proud man – even though he’s relegated to painting the houses of folks much better off than he is.

When Stan’s asked by a one of Manhattan’s rich landlords to find a lost woman, he tries to refuse. But money lures him in. Physically, Stan is average, mid-to-late 30s, about 5’7”, round face, and a little bedraggled. As the novel's narrator, he speaks with the accent of a Polish immigrant.

Mads Mikkelsen, the actor, could conceivably play Stan Kaminski in a movie version of The Skinny. He looks like the person who I imagine Stan would look like, the roundish face, somewhat beaten down, as he appears in Vintenberg’s The Hunt.

0 Comments

Alert! 3 Events For My Novel, The Skinny

The Skinny: Video Games That Influenced My Mystery Novel

Unboxing The Skinny!

In The Skinny, New York Is A Nuanced Main Character

The Skinny Mystery: Who Is Charmaine?

The Skinny Mystery: Who Is Stan Kaminski?

Author

Archives

Categories