Tom Piazza is the author of nine books, including the novel City of Refuge, which Harper published this week, and the book-length post-Katrina essay Why New Orleans Matters. He has been awarded the James Michener Award for Fiction and the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, among many other honors. A well-known writer on American music, too, he won a 2004 Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey. He lives in New Orleans. Visit harpercollins.com/cityofrefuge to read an excerpt from City of Refuge.
On your nightstand now:
Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Nostromo by Joseph Conrad.
Favorite book when you were a child:
You Will Go to the Moon by Mae and Ira Freeman. Also Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories--whacked-out, hallucinatory nonsense parables; I can't believe they let kids read it--and The Indians Knew by Tillie S. Pine, whom I actually met years later in a movie theater, with her husband, who used to own a great used bookstore in Greenwich Village.
Your top five authors:
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, W. B. Yeats, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville. That was six. Sorry.
How about something more contemporary?:
Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Joan Didion, Alice Munro, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow.
Even more contemporary?:
What do you mean by contemporary? Franzen isn't contemporary enough? Okay: George Saunders, Judy Budnitz, Michael Chabon, ZZ Packer, Mary Gaitskill.
Authors who should be better known:
Chris Adrian, Marly Swick, Holiday Reinhorn, Cate Marvin, Joanna Scott, Norman Rush.
Book you've faked reading:
The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. It was his first novel, published when he was something like 24, and probably the culmination of the 19th Century novel tradition, with a number of surreptitious proto-modernist structural elements that you don't notice on first reading. Also The King and the Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer. Zimmer was a follower of C.G. Jung and an expert in the art of India. In The King and the Corpse, he retells folk tales from the 1,001 Nights, the Arthurian cycle and other sources, and breaks down what they are really telling us about human consciousness. It's amazing. Any writer would profit from reading it. Also the very neglected Bloods by Wallace Terry, an oral history of black Vietnam veterans.
Books you've bought for the cover:
All of the old Anchor paperbacks from the 1950s with the Edward Gorey covers.
Book that changed your life:
Vibrations, the autobiography of the composer David Amram. It made me want to be an artist when I was in junior high school. Also An American Dream by Norman Mailer. In some ways it is a pretty cheesy novel, but the writing is electricity itself, and it made me want to be a writer.
Favorite line from a book:
"The hour has come to cook their lordships' mutton."-–Odysseus to Telemachus in The Odyssey (Robert Fitzgerald's translation).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
You Will Go to the Moon.