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Ex libris
We asked a dozen authors with books out this fall one simple question: What are you reading?
BY MIKE MILIARD



Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker, the " Dean of American Crime Fiction, " is the creator of Spenser, Boston’s favorite fictional, for-hire private eye. He was recently named 2002 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and his latest novel, published this year, is Shrink Rap (Putnam). He lives in Cambridge.

" I read very little fiction; I tend to look at it the way carpenters look at houses. But I have recently read Jonathan Lear’s book, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul [Harvard University Press, 1998], which is about Freud and the classical philosophers, which I found fascinating, though heavy going. I am reading, in periodic installments, Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes [Knopf, 1999], which is about art and culture in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. I find it enriching and enlarging. Schama is a hell of a writer. I like both books, but even if I didn’t, they make such a dignified answer to questions like this. "

Colm Tóibín

The Irish Independent has called journalist, essayist, and novelist Colm Tóibín " the best Irish writer of his generation. " His novels include The Story of the Night (Henry Holt, 1999) and The Blackwater Lightship (Scribner, 2000), and he’s the editor of the 1120-page Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (Viking Press, 2000). His newest work, Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature (Scribner), will be published in October. He lives in Dublin.

" I’ve just read a book by Lillian Faderman called Naked in the Promised Land [Houghton Mifflin, 2003]. It’s absolutely sensational. It’s a memoir. And it’s a wonderful account of being the daughter and the niece of the only two survivors of ... it was either the Latvian or Lithuanian pogroms. They were two bewildered Jewish ladies in America, working so hard to keep this extraordinarily talented and beautiful niece of theirs so she would fulfill their American dream. She does everything: she’s brilliant academically, but she also works as a stripper. And she’s found the photographs in the magazine that she worked for, from these ’60s skin magazines, of her stripped. And they’re reproduced in the book. Which is astonishing — one moment she’s at her graduation, beautifully dressed with her mother, and the next page there she is with her breasts! It’s an absolutely marvelous book. She became a really important lesbian academic. And she’s a pioneer in all types of things in terms of minority studies. She’s been critically responsible in America for the changing of the canon from being Dead White Males to being other people. But the book is sort of a mixture of being a dutiful daughter and being the Wildest Girl in America. And being a brilliant academic. And I’m not joking how good it is.

" At the moment, I’m sitting here reading The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry, 1861-1884 [University Press of Virginia, 1992]. I’m actually on page 355. It’s edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis — you Americans have such brilliant names! — and Elizabeth M. Berkeley.

" The other book that I’ve read, that is out on this side of the Atlantic this week, but I think is published again in the spring in the United States, is published by an Irish novelist named Anne Enright. It’s called The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch [Grove/Atlantic, 2003]. Now, Eliza Lynch was an Irish woman in the 19th century who’s a sort of madame in Paris. And she marries the dictator of Paraguay. She went down the river, which is sensationally described in the book, and ended up in Paraguay. And this is an incredibly funny book. It really is, just sentence by sentence, very hard to match. She writes sparkling, funny, sharp sentences describing the journey up the river and the arrival in Paraguay of this strange Irish woman. "

Lynn Pruett

Mount Holyoke graduate Lynn Pruett has had stories published in several literary magazines and is a professor at the University of Kentucky. Her debut novel, Ruby River (Atlantic Monthly Press), about a young widow raising children and running a truck stop in a tiny Alabama town, was published this month. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

" I’ve just finished reading a book of poems called Skin [Texas Tech University Press, 2002], by April Lindner. It’s just come out. I love the poems because her language and her tone are so consistent even though she writes about a range of experiences. She has a great poem about a tornado coming and hiding in the basement. And she has the dangerous thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our house blew away.’ It’s not an angry thought; just, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have your life cleansed and start over again.’ I think it’s interesting. And I would love to go to the beach with her, because what she sees at the beach is way beyond what I see when I go to the beach. I think, ‘Wow, how could you be thinking and writing and recording these things when you go to the beach?’ The little tiny curls of the oysters and the ways that people are relating to each other. It’s so specific and so precise. When I’m at the beach, I just see things so much more generally.

" I also just finished Barry Hannah’s book, Yonder Stands Your Orphan [Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001]. I just think he’s a master. In one of my favorite passages, there’s a character who’s a saxophone player, and he has this younger, sort of hot wife who sings and everyone comes to hear her. And then he starts to play the sax. And it’s so mournful. Barry’s line is, ‘It’s as if there was a tax on joy.’ And I just love that sense that there’s something wonderful, and then this man comes in with his sax and it’s awful. It’s like you can’t have fun. And I think the book is a lot about that, wanting to feel joy and then you have all these cranky people who are, some of them, quite evil. They’re stuck in this little community and they’re all looking for joy. They’re all orphans in a way. And there seems to be this overriding meanness in the air. And then, of course, Hannah writes so well. And he’s funny as well. I love that book.

" Another one is called Soy la Avon Lady [Curbstone Press, 2002], by Lorraine López. It’s a collection of stories that came out this spring. These stories are absolutely wonderful because there’s always some peculiar person, in terms of behavior, who kind of upsets the apple cart. And they act in such unusual ways that as a reader you’re quite fascinated by it. And often that person doesn’t change, but it’s the narrator who understands something — sometimes something not nice about life. But I love the way it turns, too. And her cast of characters and the language are really beautiful. "

Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of Fight Club (W.W. Norton, 1996), the cult novel that was later rendered as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. His other books include Survivor (W.W. Norton, 1999), Invisible Monsters (W.W. Norton, 1999), and Choke (Doubleday, 2001). Palahniuk’s newest novel is the supernatural thriller Lullaby (Doubleday). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

" I just finished reading How to Lose Friends and Alienate People [Da Capo Press, 2002], by Toby Young. I’m also reading 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com [Free Press, 2002], by Mike Daisey, a memoir of when he went to work at Amazon.com. And the books are so similar, it’s almost like an American and a British version of the same story. The Mike Daisey book is almost the same in that he’s sort of an up-and-coming kid who gets a job in a growing industry and develops a drinking problem and falls in love and ends up being saved by his marriage despite his career failure and his drinking. They’re almost identical plot lines, told by [people of] two different nationalities. Toby’s book is funnier, because he’s dealing with a lot more glamour, with Vanity Fair and Hollywood celebrity.

" What else have I been reading ... oh, oh! I just read Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London [Doubleday, 2002], by Shawn Levy. It’s his study of London in the swinging ’60s. And he did it all in first-person interviews with Terrence Stamp and Vidal Sassoon and Mary Quant and all those people. It’s really all primary sources. I read it coming to and from Great Britain on the plane. It’s very, very good. "

J.D. McClatchy

J.D. McClatchy is a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and the editor of the Yale Review. This season, in addition to editing Horace the Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, 2002) and James Merrill: Collected Novels and Plays (Knopf, 2002), he completed a book of new poems, Hazmat (Knopf), that will be published in October. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut.

" I tend to read books simultaneously, so there’s a stack of just- or nearly finished books still on my night table. The best of them are Iain Pears’s novel The Dream of Scipio [Riverhead Books, 2002], [with] intriguingly juxtaposed episodes across the centuries about the fascination over a manuscript — and the irrational passions that prompt our writing about wisdom; Hermann Kurzke’s new biography of Thomas Mann [Thomas Mann: Life As a Work of Art, a Biography, Princeton University Press, 2002], really a dazzling series of variations on the narrative themes of the novelist’s life; and William H. Gass’s new collection of essays, Tests of Time [Knopf, 2002], his elegant and exuberant takes on the culture and politics of literature.

" I’ve also been re-reading — in the magisterial Library of America edition — a lot of Robert Frost lately, the best-known and least-understood of all American poets, and thereby one of the hardest to take any true measure of — his very celebrity clouding the razor-edged desolation of his grandest poems. His range can seem narrow, until one realizes that in his common country matters is the history of the human heart. If his gaze is steady, it is also unflinching. Few poets caused as much emotional pain in others, or wrote about the consequences so frighteningly. And the composure with which he writes of heartache, the intimacy with which he writes of mortal loss, are as eerie as anything ever put on paper. "

Michael Johnston

After graduating from Yale, Michael Johnston taught in a decrepit high school in Greenville, Mississippi. He relates his experiences there in his just-released In the Deep Heart’s Core (Grove), a book that education activist Jonathan Kozol calls " a poetic work of selflessness and quiet decency ... hard-earned victory and personal transcendence. " The co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, Johnston lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he attends Yale Law School in preparation for a career in education reform.

" I’m reading two collections of short stories. One is Marc Nesbitt’s Gigantic [Grove, 2002], and the other is my friend Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here [Doubleday, 2002]. He’s a classmate of mine at law school. His book has obviously had great success, and I just saw him yesterday, so I just picked up a copy of that. At school we’ve actually shared carrels across the way. He was working fastidiously at his book, and so was I. I just know that he was working on the short-stories book and had taken some time off to be in Iowa and was invested a great deal in fiction. We hadn’t had a lot of time to talk lately, but he was a classmate of mine and somebody who’d received a lot of buzz, so I was interested in checking out the book.

" Nesbitt’s book, I like very much. I’ve actually just started Adam’s book, so I’m not far enough in yet to comment on it with any intelligence, but Nesbitt’s book I like quite a bit. It’s very sharp, very well-written, very evocative in a way that — at least not like short stories I’ve read recently — combines a sort of Raymond Carver, middle-America-type sentiment with something of young urban disenfranchisement. At the risk of sounding clichéd, it’s kind of Raymond-Carver-meets-Kids. I thought it was really intelligent and kind of avant-garde.

" I’ve just started Adam’s book, but from talking to friends of ours and reading reviews I know that they’re also kind of dark stories about people of all ages struggling through despairs of different sorts and how they either do or don’t find their way out of them. All the people I’ve spoken to who’ve read it have found it very moving in the power it has to evoke despair. That’s an odd sentiment to have at the end of a book, that you’re so moved by the sadness of it, but I think he does that very well. "

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet Paul Muldoon has authored eight books of poetry, which were collected earlier this year as Poems 1968-1998 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). His latest work, Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar Straus & Giroux), will be published in October. He lives in England and New Jersey, where he holds professorships at the University of Oxford and Princeton University.

" I have this book in my hand which is called The Man in the Ice: True Story of the 5,000-Year-Old Man Found in an Alpine Glacier [Doubleday of Canada, 1995], by Konrad Spindler. This was a body of a Neolithic man which was found in 1991 in the Alps. The book is fascinating. It’s quite extraordinary. Of course, most of what I read is poetry; I try to keep abreast of what’s happening in the poetry world. But after that, most of what I read is material of this kind, rather than fiction. In other words, a lot of nonfiction books on just interesting topics. A lot can be deduced by the various bits and pieces around this guy: from his clothes, his teeth, the fact that he was carrying tinder. I think it’s an intrinsically interesting subject, what we can glean about how those societies operated and, in many ways, how little has changed over 5000 years. That they were able to deduce, or at least the theory is, that he died while trying to escape some kind of pogrom on his village. That he was being pursued and was wounded. It’s very hard to judge exactly what happened, of course, but it looks as if he fell while he was running and broke a couple ribs and then put himself in this fetal position, the position in which he would feel least pain from his injuries. There’s something quite touching about being able to see the details of his life and society. I feel a kind of kinship for these characters. In a strange way, how little things have changed. "

Gary Krist

Gary Krist has written two short-story collections, The Garden State (Vintage Books, 1989) and Bone by Bone (Harcourt Brace, 1994), and two novels, Bad Chemistry (Random House, 1998) and Chaos Theory (Random House, 2000). His new novel, Extravagance (Broadway Books), focuses on the stock exchanges of 21st-century New York and 17th-century London (and features the gleaming towers of the World Trade Center on its cover). It will be published later this month. Krist lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

" I’m reading that huge tome Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [Oxford University Press, 1998], by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace. It’s sort of early research for a next novel. I just have gotten into the historical thing with my most recent novel. I did London in the 17th century, now I’m doing New York in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s a huge sweep of history, from when Henry Hudson rode up the river in 1603, through to the end of the 19th century — just the classic pageant of personalities and events. It’s unbelievable how much New York has been through. I was just reading the Triangle Shirt Waist factory section, which was that horrible fire at the beginning of the 20th century. They were describing how people were jumping out of the windows to escape the fire and hitting the pavement. It was frightening because it was just bringing back everything that happened last year. The 20th century in New York was kind of bracketed by these two horrible events.

" But the personalities are what most attract me, particularly the bosses in 19th-century New York. Basically they were running New York and filling their pockets to a really ridiculous extent. Boss Tweed was never mayor, he was just controller of the machine. And, yes, these bosses were incredibly corrupt, but they got things done. New York was really unlivable before that era. It was pretty unlivable afterwards, too!

" I’m reading a novel called The Wasties [Pantheon, 2002], by Frederick Reuss, which is a hilarious novel about a guy who’s basically losing his ability to function. He can’t speak, he can hardly move around. It’s basically all interior monologue. It is grim, but it’s really black humor, and it makes me laugh out loud. Which is unusual when you consider the subject. "

Leif Enger

Leif Enger’s best-selling debut novel, Peace Like a River (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), was featured on several publications’ 2001 year-end best lists and contains, according to Frank McCourt, " passages so wondrous and wise you’ll want to claw yourself with pleasure. " It was just published in paperback by Grove Press. Enger lives on a farm in Minnesota.

" I just read a really good book that’s coming out in October by Mark Dunn, who wrote Ella Minnow Pea [MacAdam/Cage, 2001]. This one is called Welcome to Higby [MacAdam/Cage]. And I’ve just finished an advance-reading copy, and it’s marvelous. It’s funny. It’s completely different from his first book, which also had funny moments, but this is more of a classic comic novel in the vein of a James Wolcott; it reminded me too at times of Larry McMurtry. Good stuff. I recommend it.

" I’m also reading — I don’t usually read stuff that’s brand new, I read stuff that’s been around for a while — I’m now reading Wonder Boys [Villard, 1995], by Michael Chabon, and I’m finding a whole lot to like about it. Just his beautiful language, his wonderful metaphors and sentence structure, and his amazing generosity to his readers. I thought the movie was pretty faithful. The only major difference I see is there’s kind of a longish section in the middle of the book, where Grady Tripp goes to visit his in-laws, and they completely cut that from the movie.

" I’m reading a life of Teddy Roosevelt that came out a while ago called T.R: The Last Romantic [Basic Books, 1997], by H.W. Brands. I’m liking that very much. It’s an awfully good life of T.R. He’s one of my favorite people. I like how bold, how audacious, and how uncompromising he was. He was a shrewd politician, but he was also, I think, incredibly honest and had no qualms about pursuing what he thought was the right course. I think this biography does him justice. And I think it also doesn’t indulge in hero-worship, which would be easy to do with a strong personality like that.

" I also just finished a really interesting book on the craft of acting. I’m not an actor myself, and I have no desire to be. But I’m an admirer of David Mamet, and he wrote this book called True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor [Pantheon, 1997]. It’s about the craft of acting, but it’s as much about living according to stoic principles as it is about the craft. It’s a brilliant book. I enjoyed it all the way through. "

Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein’s short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story and the Literary Review. His debut story collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W (W.W. Norton), which consists of five re-imaginings of classic works (by Auden, Kafka, Hawthorne, Singer, and Fitzgerald) transpiring in the same apartment complex, will be published later this month. He lives in Brooklyn.

" I’m reading Patrick O’Brien ... which one am I up to? I think number six. It’s called The Fortune of War [W.W. Norton, 1994]. I think it’s great. I’ve also been reading Trollope, of all people. I’ve been reading all these serials — [Trollope’s] Barsetshire novels and Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin novels. I just love the vividness of the world O’Brien creates. It’s incredible stuff. I keep expecting to get sick of it because there are so many installments. And I don’t. What are there, 20-odd or something? They’re a whole lot of fun. With Trollope, I’m really enjoying coming back to the same characters again and again. "

Thomas Laird

Thomas Laird is a writer and photographer for Asiaweek. Currently at work with the Dalai Lama on A History of Tibet, his most recent book is Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Grove). He lives in Katmandu, Nepal.

" I’m reading a number of things. Well, first of all, I’m having to re-read Into Tibet because I’m about to go out on a reading tour! I’m also reading American Slavery: 1619-1877 [Hill & Wang, 1993], by Peter Kolchin. It’s stunning. I’m really enjoying it. It’s a little dry for the average reader, but for me as a history writer it’s very interesting how he takes the issue of slavery [and] digs into its history, looking back at its roots. We usually think of slavery of 1860 onward, but don’t really consider what it was like here in the 1600s and 1700s.

" I’m also reading The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia [Princeton University Press, 1993], by Christopher I. Beckwith. It’s the first history of Tibet and inner Asia in the eighth century. It’s fascinating. In the West, we’re not really educated about inner-Asian history. It’s a huge area, about the size of Western Europe. Epochal events took place here, and we really don’t know much about them. "

Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes is the author of best-selling memoirs Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (Chronicle Books, 1996) and Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy (Broadway Books, 1999), as well as The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems (Harvest Books, 2001). Her debut novel, Swan (Broadway), will be published in October. She lives in Italy and San Francisco.

" I’m just starting a biography of an English landscape designer [William Kent: Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685-1748, by Michael I. Wilson, Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1984], but what I just finished and what I’m most enthusiastic about is Austerlitz [Random House, 2001], by W.G. Sebald. I am going to re-read that. It’s one of the few books that I finish and I immediately want to go back to the beginning again. It’s a very mysterious and layered book, and it’s so complex you feel like you need to read it two or three times to be sure you’ve absorbed the whole book.

" I’ve read his other books, The Emigrants [New Directions, 1996], The Rings of Saturn [New Directions, 1998], and Vertigo [New Directions, 2000]. But, for me, Austerlitz was really the best of his books. It’s too bad he died because I think he was really on his way to being the major writer of our time in that form. It’s a curious book because it does everything they would teach you in a fiction-writing class not to do. He’s telling the story of this man, Austerlitz, and he tells it through the voice of a narrator. And you don’t quite know what the role of the narrator is, but as you read you realize that this narrator enables him to further distance you from the action of the book. He wants the action at a remove, and he uses this narrator, who then lets the main character speak for himself. And the main character speaks for himself and at the same time he’s often quoting other people. So there are these three, at least, layers of narration that create a kind of suspended tone. And any time the action becomes foremost in the interest if the reader, [Sebald] undercuts it. He doesn’t use traditional methods of building suspense and creating immediacy and all those things. He will let you know that a revelation is coming, but then he’ll make sure you don’t get too involved in how it comes about. It’s very strange narration.

" But the subject matter is what interests me the most, aside from the technique: the scattering of people because of the Holocaust. He does not write about the Holocaust per se, but he writes about how it affected lives of people who left there. He does that in all his books. This one is a little more directly connected because the main character does go back to visit one of the concentration camps. But in general it’s more of a dispersion of influence. It’s very involved in a concept of time and memory that is very porous. I love some of the ways he moves his books along by these poetic scatterings of images. I think it’s really beautiful. "

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com

Issue Date: September 19 - 26, 2002
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