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| photo: Kate Slininger | |
Clifford Thompson is an essayist and the winner of the 2013 Whiting Award for nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2018 and elsewhere. His new book is What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues (Other Press, November 2019).
On your nightstand now:
Benjamin Moser's new biography of Susan Sontag, who had one of the most ridiculously brilliant literary minds of modern times; Toni Morrison's book of essays, The Source of Self-Regard; and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, a book of poems by A. Van Jordan.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee. The book details the stories behind the creation of the costumed heroes I loved, who had superpowers but human fears and insecurities. Also, various collections of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strips.
Your top five authors:
James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Tobias Wolff, Albert Murray--and a three-way tie: Ralph Ellison, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison.
Book you've faked reading:
George Eliot's Middlemarch--I never did make it all the way through that thing. But reportedly I've got that in common with the critic Edmund Wilson, so I don't feel quite so bad.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray (1970). This was the book that helped me understand the central role that blacks have played in defining America and the cultural interrelatedness of all Americans.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Still Life with Woodpecker, a novel by Tom Robbins. I ran across it in a bookstore when I was in high school; its cover was made to look like a pack of Camel cigarettes, my mother's brand. I was intrigued, and I became a devotee of Robbins's wild tales for a time.
Book you hid from your parents:
I honestly can't remember one. My parents were cool. Or I was boring.
Book that changed your life:
I'll limit it to three. The aforementioned The Omni-Americans; that old standby The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, whose narrator seemed to me an older version of Charlie Brown from Peanuts; and James Baldwin's woefully underrated novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone--I had never before read a story that showed such intimacy between blacks and whites.
Favorite line from a book:
"When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun." -- opening sentence of Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Five books you'll never part with:
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin; We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live--Collected Nonfiction by Joan Didion; Raymond Carver's Collected Stories; The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (whole lotta collectin' goin' on); and The Omni-Americans.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.
A writer you consider to be underrated:
Thomas Rayfiel, the author of nine quirky, innovative novels. I think his book In Pinelight is one of the great novels of the last few years.