On your nightstand now:
If by "nightstand" you mean a place where unread books are stored in teetering stacks, my nightstands are scattered throughout my apartment. By this reckoning I have seven nightstands and in those various places you'll find: Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Hermann Hesse's Demian, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano, etc.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Peanuts strip collections. I can't remember their titles but any book that collected Peanuts strips were my favorites, along with the Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia series, a 16-volume collection of slender hardcover books my grandmother bought every other week at the grocery store for $4 apiece.
Your top five authors:
I'm more a fan of books than authors. And I can't cite a top five because that list changes all the time. If you had to ask me what five books I'm in love with right now, I'd say Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, Stoner by John Williams (introduced to me by a great writer, teacher and mentor, Nick Lyons), 2666 by Roberto Bolano, The Living End by Stanley Elkin and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Book you've faked reading:
The Bible. I know I'd be a better writer if I sat down and read it cover to cover. Adding it to the nightstand.
Book you're an evangelist for:
When I was an editor, I was a proselytizer for whatever current books were on my list. Several titles I worked on over the years come to mind, but at the risk of offending any of my former authors, I'll cite a book I discovered while working at Grove/Atlantic. My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan (published by G/A) is an epic work of reportage spanning decades of South African history and may be the most honest memoir I've ever read of a man's search for his identity and his place in a radically evolving society. There's a cover quote from Michael Herr that says, "No one who reads it could ever forget it." I read Heart six years ago and still find myself recommending it more than any other book, so Herr must be right.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Perfume by Patrick Suskind. But I also bought it because it was on Borders's "3-for-2" books table. Either way, great novel.
Book that changed your life:
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. I took a general survey of 20th-century American literature class where we had to read a novel a week. It was a popular class so the professor assigned Absalom during week two to weed out anyone who wasn't serious about the course. It worked. I remember the lecture hall, which the previous week had students sitting in the aisles, sounding cavernous as our professor's voice echoed against all those now-empty seats. I'm glad I stayed. Imagine someone burning down all your established rules and frameworks for reading fiction then watching them build gorgeous and intricate new visions with that fire. Everything that the novel is capable of is in Absalom.
Favorite line from a book:
Right now it's the last line of the story "Brokeback Mountain." I won't spoil it here if you haven't read it, but if you haven't read it, stop reading this and get a copy of Annie Proulx's Close Range right now. Seeing the movie doesn't count.
That line is everything I'm trying to do when I sit down to write and 10 times out of 10 fail at. I keep trying because one day I might--might--get a line almost as good as that one. But I doubt it.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I'll go with another Grove book (it was a great perk to have free access to such a phenomenal backlist): A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Humor is difficult to execute on the page, yet over the course of 400 pages Toole gets the belly laughs by displaying an enormous amount of empathy for every one of his characters. None of the laughs come at any character's expense and it's one of the reasons why the book is hysterical. It also reminds me how many books could be improved with a healthy dose of humor.
