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| photo: Wyatt McSpadden | |
Brian Hart was born in Idaho in 1976. He was awarded the Keene Prize in 2006, received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in 2008 and is a Dobie Paisano Johnston Fellow for 2014. His first novel, Then Came the Evening, was published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. His second novel, The Bully of Order, was just published by Harper. He lives in Austin, Tex., with his wife and daughter.
On your nightstand now:
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, Smith Henderson's Fourth of July Creek, George Oppen's Of Being Numerous and 31 Letters and 13 Dreams by Richard Hugo.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I remember plowing through a yard or so of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys one summer.
Your top five authors :
Tolstoy, Faulkner, Alistair MacLeod, Twain, Melville.
Book you've faked reading:
Fake reading is like fake sleeping: sometimes you just end up doing it anyway. That said, I probably fake read/fake slept through parts of Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks. I was living in Juneau, Alaska, at the time and was hungover a lot, faking my way through whole segments of my existence. I do remember enjoying the book, though, and I have a great respect for Mr. Banks's work. I'll try it again.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis. It's genuinely funny, which is rare enough, but it's the line-by-line quality, particularly in the dialogue, that I really admire. He's a writer that people should've been paying attention to for years, but it seems it took the Coen brothers to break the story [with their film adaptation of his novel True Grit]. Sergei Dovlatov is another writer I've been telling people to read, and Halldór Laxness is a third. I'm sure there are dozens more; thankfully, there always seem to be more. Smith Henderson, for example.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I've bought albums and dirty magazines for their covers, but I can't remember buying a book for that reason.
Book that changed your life:
Light in August by William Faulkner. So the ending is a bit of a botch, I don't care. Nobody gets that isolation-tank immersion quite like Faulkner. He has an otherworldly capacity for focus; even when he's swerving into the wrong lane, he stays on the riff, keeps his rhythm.
A writer--living or dead--for whom you'd take a bullet:
I'd take a bullet for Faulkner to save his life and a bullet for (young) Hemingway to piss him off. Actually, I'm sure both of them (again, in their younger days) would've preferred to take their own bullets so that they could write about it later. Who wouldn't? (I'm not really asking, so don't answer.)
Favorite line from a book:
"Get away from me yer stupid chicken." --Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Which character you most relate to:
Many years ago, I wanted to be George Washington Hayduke (from Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang), mostly because he measured distance in six-packs of beer and got into fights he couldn't win. See below to discover where that got me.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I'm probably right around a baker's dozen with concussions, so I get to read a lot of books again for the first time. Right now, I'm rereading Faulkner's Snopes trilogy again for the first time and it's amazing. Make it new, right?