Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock (winner of the Los Angeles Arts Council Award for Fiction), Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (finalist for the Orange Prize in England and the IMPAC award in Dublin), Sunday's Silence and Caspian Rain (MacAdam
Cage, $25, 9781596922518/1596922516), which is being published October
16. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation and has studied
the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States
Department of Defense. Nahai lives in Los Angeles, where she is a
professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.
Here she answers questions we occasionally put to people in the
industry:On your nightstand now:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Favorite book when you were a child:
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Your top five authors:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marguerite Duras, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Adrienne Sharp
Book you've faked reading:
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Book you are an evangelist for:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Book you've bought for the cover:
Sleeping Beauty, A Novel by Adrienne Sharp
Book that changed your life:
Nothing, and So Be It by Orianna Fallaci
Favorite line from a book:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Collected Short Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez