Eli Gottlieb grew up in New Jersey. Self-taught, self-educated for the most, never got an advanced degree in the fancypants MFA programs of America. Worked instead as a journalist all over the place, reviewed books, spent eight years living in Italy, which changed his life (and according to friends who saw him afterward, the shape of his head). Author of two novels, The Boy Who Went Away and Now You See Him (this last one quite beloved by indie booksellers), Gottlieb's The Face Thief (Morrow, January 12, 2012) is about a woman who uses her face-reading talents to defraud and deceive a galaxy of kind-hearted (male) dupes.
On your nightstand now:
Arguably by Christopher Hitchens. The last collection by the great controversialist, infighter and prose magician is a miscellany of his recent--and astonishing--output. Hitchens has taken more political positions than a pinwheel, with the inevitable result that he's often wrong. But the man was constitutionally allergic to cant and incapable of writing a dull sentence--two things which by themselves confer on him prized bedside status.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I devoured it repeatedly as a very young boy, at that time of life when--back in the '60s anyway--a book could successfully compete with a film for mental traction. The image of these men crash-landed on a remote island and fashioning a life for themselves using only native plants and the most rudimentary tools stays with me to this day.
Your top five authors:
Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Peter Handke, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce.
Book you've faked reading:
Don Quixote. But then again, no one, except one very bored bachelor friend of mine, has ever read the whole thing. Even Updike threw up his effete hands and confessed he'd drowned before reaching the far shore.
Book you're an evangelist for:
In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan. Though more known for his magisterial novels, McEwan wrote two collections of magnetic short stories. This is the better of the two. Try out his story "Psychopolis," and laugh even as you weep for the poor overmastered boyfriend.
Book you've bought for the cover:
None.
Book that changed your life:
Herzog by Saul Bellow. Bellow is the novelist I've read the most closely, and this is arguably his finest book. He stands quite rightly accused of writing somewhat one-dimensional female characters. But what I got out of this book was freedom--the freedom to attack the citadel of mandarin American prose armed only with your native idiom--Yiddish--and a set of great big cojones. I learned how to write by reading Herzog--an act which, I blush to confess, has taken place at least a dozen times.
Favorite line from a book:
"After the fall of Napoleon, the ambitious young man took his power drive into the boudoir, and there the woman took command." From Herzog. The sentence hints at a backstory of spectacular erotic combat in its author.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. One of the blackest and most brilliant dark hearts of American literature, the book is a fever dream of beautifully compressed language and satire without equal.