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| photo: Marianne Barcellona | |
Rachel Cantor's stories have appeared in the Paris Review, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review and Fence, have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times, and have been shortlisted by both Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards. Cantor has received fellowships from the Yaddo Corporation, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and she has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Wesleyan writing conferences. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her debut novel is A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World (Melville House, January 14, 2014). See the book trailer here.
On your nightstand now:
There are 18 books on my nightstand, including The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt; Pitch Dark by Renata Adler; Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon; To the End of the Land by David Grossman; How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu; Dybbuk by Gershon Winkler; and A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield.
Favorite book when you were a child:
So many! If I had to narrow it down: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; Charlotte's Web by E. B. White; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Jane Eyre, if I had to narrow it down furthest.
Your top five authors:
Charlotte Brontë, Dante, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Italo Calvino. I pick these from hundreds of candidates because they appear in or otherwise inspired my fiction.
Book you've faked reading:
I've never faked reading anything, I don't believe, though I once told a professor I'd read Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern, because I confused it with Henry Fielding's Tom Jones! There was plenty of assigned reading I didn't get to in college, like, um, Emerson and, um, Marx. There was a period of time when I traveled with Finnegans Wake by James Joyce in my backpack but never read a word of it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
There are several British writers for whom I'm an evangelist, I suppose because they, or some of their best books, are not as well known in the U.S. as they should be: Penelope Fitzgerald (Offshore), Beryl Bainbridge (A Quiet Life), A.L. Kennedy (Paradise), Zoe Heller (What Was She Thinking?), early Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy), Rose Tremain (Restoration, The Colour), Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black). I also read male authors, but I evangelize for the women.
Book you've bought for the cover:
How to Get into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak (Two Dollar Radio). It's a wonderful cover, and a wonderful, wonderful book. And if my publisher hadn't given me a copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher, I would have bought that based on the cover--it's gorgeous!
Book that changed your life:
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White.
Favorite line from a book:
The last line of "Gusev" by Anton Chekhov. Gusev has died and been cast from his ship into the ocean: he moves more and more slowly toward the bottom; a shoal of fish is delighted with him; a shark ignores him, then tears apart the sailcloth in which he's wrapped, causing a weight in the bag to plummet. Presumably Gusev will now float back to the surface; nonetheless, the sun sets. "Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech" (Constant Garnett, translator).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras, but only if I could be 22 again!
Book you were handsold that you can't stop thinking about:
I asked a bookseller at a book fair to handsell me a book; what he chose was Tirza by Arnon Grunberg. I thought about that book for weeks after!