Drew Magary's first novel is The Postmortal (trade paperback, Penguin, August 30, 2011), a dystopian take on what it would be like to live forever. He's a writer for Gawker's Deadspin, the blog Kissing Suzy Kolber, GQ, Maxim, NBC and anywhere else that will offer him money to spout off about random crap.
On your nightstand now:
Life, the Keith Richards autobiography. I'll read anything about people doing lots of drugs and/or getting lost at sea. My wife also threw The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls on my book stack but I'm never gonna read it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Green Eggs and Ham. Mostly because of the ham.
Your top five authors:
John Kennedy Toole, Jon Krakauer, Shakespeare, James Joyce, J.K. Rowling
Book you've faked reading:
In sixth grade, I picked A Christmas Carol for a book report because I knew the basic story. Then when my teacher asked me about the particulars of the book, I had to open it right in front of her and figure it out in real time. I did not do well.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Usually I'm the one who's being proselytized to about books because I can be extremely lazy about reading stuff. But I will say that anyone who hasn't read The Dirt by Motley Crue and Neil Strauss needs to read it and memorize it immediately.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. They didn't even need artwork. It was just like, "Hey, here's the title and we don't need to do anything more to it because this book will ruin your s***."
Book that changed your life:
Probably Catch-22, because it was the first time I was assigned a book in school that I actually ended up enjoying. Before that, books were just horrible things that I tried to survive reading.
Favorite line from a book:
"This a lotta s***." --From A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Dirt. I'll never get tired of reading about Nikki Sixx nailing his roommate's ear to the floor.