Marco Roth was raised amid "the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side." After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazine n+1 in 2004. A recipient of the 2011 Shattuck Prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia. His first book, the memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance, was recently published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
On your nightstand now:
On the glass-and-steel coffee table next to my mattress: Leonard Michaels's collected stories; Bernard Malmud's collected stories; John Clare's poems; The Basic Kafka, a vintage 1950s paperback of tiny trim size and crumbling pages; Faulkner's Light in August, in an edition of similar shape, age and condition; and the page proofs of n+1 issue 14, "Awkward Age." I spend a lot of time in bed.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Childhood reading has so many stages; do I really remember the taste of the pages of Rosie's Walk? That might have been my favorite book to chew on. Going through some old stuff, recently, I turned up this magnificently psychedelically illustrated edition of World Tales, a kind of Joseph Campbell inspired, 1970s, pan-folkloric anthology that had everything from classic Brothers Grimm to Sufi mystics. It was like Propp's Morphology of Folk Tales for kids. I also found my old collection of Asterix comics.
Your top five authors:
Let me narrow this down by listing five authors I turned to while writing my book, so a list of favorite "creative nonfiction memoirists" goes, in no particular order: Stendhal, J.R. Ackerley, Wordsworth, Henry Adams, Henry Green, Proust... um, that's six, I'll stop now.
Book you've faked reading:
Lots of them, at parties, because I nod a lot when people are talking and they sometimes think that I've read a book when I haven't, and by then it's too embarrassing to tell them I haven't, because they'd think I was trying to fake it the first time but was no good at it. So I nod a lot, and then go home and read the books if they sound interesting.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Not sure I'm comfortable in missionary modes, but I've recommended Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea a lot, recently, and just lent out my copy of The Counterlife, by that other Roth guy.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most recently, Kingsley Amis's pseudonymous James Bond novel, Colonel Sun (1968). The cover, by Tom Adams, is a Dali-like Bond fantasia featuring a mannishly-proportioned nude woman on the front, with a giant ear instead of a head, a disembodied eyeball where the sun should be. In the background there's a cockle-shaped bay and a city looming above it that could be Rio, and a melted pistol snakes its way along the back flap and over the spine. It's an epic cover for a silly book, but it made me wish more contemporary books had covers with original art instead of photographs. I still haven't read the book and am not sure I want to.
Book that changed your life:
You'll have to read my book to find that out.
Favorite line from a book:
All this question makes me think of, in a backwards-opposite-by-analogy way, is King Lear asking "Which of you shall we say does love us most?" Answering it ends really badly for everyone.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
There are books that get better for me the more times I read them, like Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and other books that disappoint on rereading, so I'd have to pick one of those: I know I can never recapture the bliss of first reading Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, or the excitement of Bellow's Augie March or the mania of Herzog. There's just something about the wildness of the pace and the thrill of discovering that writing can work in those ways that won't come again.
What do you think about these author questionnaires?
On a scale of 1-10? They remind me that people write and read books because our most interesting and meaningful experiences can't be ranked, measured or condensed into a sentence.