“Camp Cataract,” by Jane Bowles, is a stunner, as is “The Remission,” by Mavis Gallant. I am very attached to particular stories and reread them when I want to remember the exhilarating possibilities of writing. Are there story writers you particularly admire, or feel more people should know about? John Updike chose your short story “In the Gloaming” as one of the best American stories of the 20th century. Nicholson Baker is endlessly inventive, funny, serious and challenging.
I like Krista Tippet’s, Miwa Messer’s and Ezra Klein’s podcasts. Roxane Gay’s and Rebecca Solnit’s bylines attract me. I recently read Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” and was excited by her determination to create histories of undocumented lives. I will always read a review by Merve Emre or James Wood. His “White Girls" and her “Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader” are favorites. Which writers - novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets - working today do you admire most? “The Good Terrorist,” by Doris Lessing,” is a thorough look at radical squatters in London and what they understand and what they don’t. It’s a scathing book that takes down the pretensions of class and empire as it entertains with quick brilliant scenes. “A Handful of Dust,” by Evelyn Waugh, always makes me squirm and hope I’m not deluding myself like Tony Last.
It takes place during a summer in Maine in a fusty old town and a house full of old-fashioned objects and habits, yet like her work in general it’s sobering about the nature of desire. I deeply love “The Catherine Wheel,” by Jean Stafford, for its extraordinary and often very funny sentences. I’ll mention three lesser-read novels by well-known authors. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? Otherwise, I like it to be summer and breezy, the air scented with spicy flowers, me in a comfortable chair or sofa with a cup of coffee and a pen for underlining. I have bought and drowned four copies of Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” - that’s how powerful her message is. This works out well for the authors, as I always go buy another copy. I love to read in the tub, but I easily fall asleep and end up with a soggy bloated creature rather than a legible book. The book depicts intransigent impediments to his prewar ideal of “only connect.”ĭescribe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). It’s very moving that Forster stopped writing at 45 after “A Passage to India,” but understandable. I had read them years earlier but without such close attention. Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?ĭuring the pandemic my writers’ reading group read the novels of E.M. That doesn’t begin to describe how brilliantly told this and all her books are, and how profoundly humane. The opening sequence is a knockout, there is an unforgettable scene on a train, and the novel reveals itself to be a murder mystery past the halfway mark. I know it by heart! What’s the last great book you read? I listen to “The Lonely City,” by Olivia Laing, read by Susan Lyons, to go to sleep. I am reading “Crossroads,” by Jonathan Franzen, “Trust,” by Hernan Diaz, “Swann’s Way,” by Marcel Proust, “Ancestor Trouble,” by Maud Newton, and forthcoming books by Eliza Minot, Laila Halaby and Laura Spence-Ash. Both those books return me to my deeper purpose as a human and as a writer. I keep “Upstream,” by Mary Oliver, and “Me & Other Writing,” by Marguerite Duras, by my bed and dip into them regularly.