![]() ![]() I want to read more of him now.Vande Velde expertly mixes horror and humor as well as the best and worst that human nature has to offer in this collection of short fiction, and she does it without relying on blood and guts.The best of these stories is the title piece. But then remembered that I recently read a short story by Ted Chiang - “The Great Silence” - that just floored me. I was going to say that I no longer read science fiction. How have your reading tastes changed over time? Somewhere inside me still, there’s a secret hippie yearning to get out. I felt like I was 10 years too late to the party. This was the mid-70s, and the ’60s were still very much in the air. I also loved Hermann Hesse - “Siddhartha,” “The Glass Bead Game.” And I read - of course - “Be Here Now,” by Ram Dass. Then, in high school, it was Carlos Castaneda, which I now find totally embarrassing. In junior high, I was very into the short stories of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?Ī 1949 hardcover edition of “Here Is New York,” by E. “Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1866.” What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? And a shelf devoted to some of my favorite painters, among them Giorgio Morandi, Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn. A half-shelf for library books, so I don’t forget where they are. My top shelves are for “short” books of all genres, and then there’s a shelf set aside for books that I’m currently reading. And another couple shelves of books about swimming and dementia and illness. ![]() I also have several shelves of books about Japanese Americans and World War II, with no organizing principle at all. I haven’t been in touch with him since, but I return to “The Lover” every now and again, and never fail to fall under its spell.įiction and poetry, alphabetically. I showed him the cover of my book - “The Lover,” by Marguerite Duras, Pantheon edition - and we got to talking. One afternoon, about 30 years ago, I was sitting in the cafe when the man at the next table leaned over and asked me what I was reading. Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you? It’s very “Black Mirror.” I’m not sure what makes a book a guilty pleasure, but you definitely know it when you’re reading one. I’m reading one right now - “The Anomaly,” by the French author Hervé Le Tellier, about a mysterious plane flight whose passengers seem to exist in two different realities. And the wonderfully irreverent journalist Jay Caspian Kang, who tells it like it is.ĭo you count any books as guilty pleasures? For thoughtful commentary on race: Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I am very interested in the plays of Will Eno, master of the profound and the absurd. I would do anything to read a new short story by Julie Hecht, who gets my vote for funniest writer. For sheer inventiveness of form, the short stories of David Means. Other writers whose work I admire: Colson Whitehead, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, David Szalay and Deborah Levy, especially her “Living Autobiography” trilogy. I will read anything by Rachel Cusk, who is doing some of the most interesting work of any writer around, and Katie Kitamura, whose recent novel “Intimacies” is both sleekly gorgeous - those sentences - and psychologically unnerving. Which writers - novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets - working today do you admire most? It is, one could say, the ultimate work of autofiction. The language is beautiful and spare, deceptively simple, exactingly precise. Through an accretion of small, obsessive details, “you” slowly comes into focus as a thoughtful, solitary, troubled man who can no longer bear to be in the world. Narrated in the “you” voice, and addressed to a friend who committed suicide 20 years earlier, the novel is a meditation on both the dead friend’s life and the act of suicide itself, as well as a farewell note from the author, who took his own life 10 days after turning in the manuscript, to his former self and to us, the reader. This book carved out a tiny hole in my heart. ![]() “Suicide,” by the French writer Edouard Levé. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
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