Joan
Frances Turner is the author of Dust (Ace Books, September 7, 2010), a story of
survival beyond the grave from the undead point of view. Turner was born in
Rhode Island and grew up in the Calumet region of northwest Indiana, where she
still lives with her family and practices law under a different name.
On your nightstand now:
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt; The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm; Wine Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 by Donald Hall; Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James; Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman; Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I scrounged up "spy clothes" and "spy tools" (a hoodie, a flashlight and a Swiss army knife) and roamed my neighborhood with a notebook just like she did, though it's just not the same having a "spy route" in the suburbs.
Your top five authors:
Angela Carter, Monika Fagerholm, Mary Gaitskill, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates. That's a severely truncated list because I can't possibly pick just five.
Book you've faked reading:
Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study by Karl Llewellyn. I received it from a well-meaning family friend when I was accepted into law school and fled screaming by page five.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. One of the best dystopian novels I've ever read, and the very best post-nuclear dystopian novel: imagine the infamous British telefilm Threads, a thousand years down the road. I also nag everyone I know to read Anthony Powell's marvelous A Dance to the Music of Time, so they can join me in fearing and loathing Kenneth Widmerpool.
Your "guilty pleasure" books:
The thriving cottage industry of Francophile self-help books that profess to teach you to eat/dress/live/think like French women, all of whom of course are earthbound déesses. Strangely, their advice never seems to include, "Learn French, because then you can skip all this very American self-improvement silliness and go straight to Colette."
Book you've bought for the cover:
Wonderful Women by the Sea by Monika Fagerholm. It was a simple four-color cover with a woman splashing through beach waves but for reasons I couldn't explain, it just drew me in. As it happens, the book itself drew me in so far that I now reread it several times a year and it keeps revealing itself in amazing new ways.
Book that changed your life:
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The language of that book was so visceral, so immediate, so supremely hyperreal that reading it was like stumbling into the narrator's roomful of blinding white lights. I only wish I could write so well, but knowing someone else could is enough.
Best book you've ever read that you were certain you'd hate:
I picked up Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad solely from a vague, dreary sense that I "should" read the Iliad, and by the end was stunned and heartbroken for both sides of the battle. The final line, "Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses," nearly made me cry.
Favorite line from a book:
The opening line of Ruth Rendell's A Judgment in Stone: "Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." It tells the reader the full unvarnished truth and yet raises an entire novel's worth of very complicated questions.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. It combines a rarity for that time period--a lesbian love story that doesn't end in utter misery--with her incredible gift for suspense, escalating dread and characters who are strange and unsettling yet never mere caricatures.