Formerly editorial director with the American Library Association, Arthur Plotnik has written many books, including The Elements of Expression (Holt), The Elements of Editing (Macmillan) and Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style (Random House). He now provides a guide for describing the extraordinary: Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives (Viva Editions, June 7, 2011).
On your nightstand now:
A sweet-dreams trio: Philip Roth's polio-themed Nemesis; Hans Keilson's Death of an Adversary, about a Nazi victim's Hitler fixation; and Don Winslow's Savages, in which necks will be chain-sawed.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The science-fiction classic Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Meteor-blinded humans and the plants eating their flesh trumped the woes of a 14-year-old.
Your top five authors:
Walker Percy, Martin Amis, E. Annie Proulx, John Updike and Sandra Cisneros at their best, which is as good as it gets in language, storytelling and heart-juddering truths.
Book you've faked reading:
A monument to my sophistication, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (translated from German) is a fixture on my shelves. It might be dazzling and ferocious, as critics say, but its 1,769 pages are typeset like the compact Oxford English Dictionary.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Garner's Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner. Sage, authoritative, entertaining--and Mahabharatan in its bounty of entries and (modern) examples. Writing without it should be a felony.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster. Image: Austere (get it?) room with writing desk, bed and luminescent white stallion. How bad could it be?
Book that changed your life:
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. By day I studied worshipfully under Roth in the Iowa Writers Workshop, and by night I devoured his new and acclaimed story collection with its seemingly achievable style, thinking, I could write like this! Yeah, sure. But in trying, I got hooked on the craft.
Favorite line from a book:
"Words, with their weight, have a tendency to fall like birds of prey on delicate ideas, carrying them away before they have a chance to reach fruition."--Lyall Watson, Lifetide.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul. I want it back: the Trinidadian banter, the poignancy and belly laughs of struggling with intrepid Mohun Biswas, wondering how he will ever escape his bullying in-laws and buy that little house of his own.
Favorite tropes from recently read books:
"His tongue darted into my mouth like a tadpole escaping from a jar."--Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
"I tasted the word like a dog testing a vegetable dropped on the floor, to see if he will eat it."--Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision.