Ethan Canin is the author of For Kings and Planets, The Palace Thief, Blue River and Emperor of Air. His latest novel, America America, comes out from Random House this month. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and on the faculty of the University of Iowa's Workshop. He lives in Iowa City.
On your nightstand now:
On it, next to it, and partway under the bed: All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Away by Amy Bloom, Memory Lessons by Jerald Winakur, Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Sand Café by Neil MacFarquhar, Jimmy Twice by Joe Blair, The Boat by Nam Le, The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz and a half dozen copies of Fine Homebuilding, to name the ones I can see without moving anything.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Baseball Life of Sandy Koufax by George Vecsey.
Your top five authors:
I could list only top five influential books, not in any order of influence but in the order that they are coming to me right now: Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Stories of John Cheever, Mr. Bridge by Evan Connell, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Alice Munro's Open Secrets, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff, The World According to Garp by John Irving, At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen, Airships by Barry Hannah and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Is that more than five?
Book you've faked reading:
Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine.
Book you are an evangelist for:
DSM IV. Try it--it will explain a lot of things.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Lust by Susan Minot.
Book that changed your life:
The Stories of John Cheever. I read it in college, and it turned me from a mechanical engineering major into an English major.
Favorite line from a book:
It has to come down to this: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."--The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
For the pure pleasure of it, this has got to be John Irving's The World According to Garp.