Paul Elie, for many years a senior editor with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is now a senior fellow with Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 2003. He lives in New York City. His new book, Reinventing Bach, was just published by FSG.
On your nightstand now:
Gordon Bowker's new biography of James Joyce.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone by Robin Lee Graham. It was retitled Dove for a tie-in with a TV movie.
Your top five authors:
Flannery O'Connor; John McPhee; Richard Holmes; Richard Rodriguez; and Bertrand R. Brinley, author of The Mad Scientists' Club series.
Book you've faked reading:
Joshua, Judges, Ruth and other patches of the Bible....
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Myth of Samson by David Grossman--at once a retelling and a midrashing of the Samson story by the great Israeli writer. I was going to call him "the great Israeli novelist," but he is one of the many novelists whom I admire mainly for their nonfiction.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Vaclav Havel's Open Letters, a 1991 Knopf hardcover with a jacket, by Chip Kidd, consisting of postage stamps featuring the dissident president's visage: the jacket captured the swiftness and definiteness of the political changes taking place in that part of the world.
Book that changed your life:
John Rockwell's All American Music.
Favorite line from a book:
"Pietas and tax evasion thus magnificently combined, Waugh set out for America on the strangest adventure of his life." It goes something like that. It's from Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, the second volume of a two-volume biography by Martin Stannard, and it suggested how worldly and otherworldly concerns could come together in a literary biography the way they came together in the subject's life. Waugh's adventure led him to Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and other American Catholic writers, and Stannard's book led me to write a book about them, called The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, which I read during a college summer abroad. So much older then--younger than that now.....
Book you wish existed so that you could read it:
A group portrait of the great American Jewish writers: Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Kazin, Roth, Wallant, Michaels, Ozick....