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Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including You & Me, The Interrogative Mood and Edisto (a finalist for the National Book Award), and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Powell lives in Gainesville, Fla., where he co-directs and teaches at the MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida. His new collection of stories is Cries for Help, Various (Catapult, September 8, 2015).
On your nightstand now:
Laughing Gas and The Best of Wodehouse by P.G. Wodehouse; Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill; Dodgers by Bill Beverly; Making Nice by Matt Sumell.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Flamingo Prince by Rubylea Hall. The author is my grandmother; the dedication is to me. I thought that meant that I somehow could be Osceola, the book's subject.
Your top five authors:
Celebrity formative package: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams (count as one); William Faulkner; Flannery O'Connor; Mark Twain; Donald Barthelme.
Book you've faked reading:
I don't fake; I admit my lassitude and ignorance. Were I to fake one, it would be Ulysses by James Joyce. I want badly to have read this, try every few years, and apparently just won't do it, through no fault of the book.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
Book you've bought for the cover:
I would buy my own The Interrogative Mood for the cover, done by Alison Forner. This cover placed second in an online best-cover contest, and was beaten by an image of a Victorian lady with half her face eaten off by zombies. Hard to beat that.
Book that changed your life:
Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane The hero of this book likes drugs, sex, fishing. I thought when I read it that these were things I had access to. If I could have access to these things--I had no access to being a planter during the Civil War, say--then I too could write of these things. Or if not these exact things, then some similar accessible things. It was a revelation. McGuane is a clean, strong writer. The excerpt of the book that I read was in a journal edited by Donald Barthelme, whom I would meet 10 years later. It was a big and meaningful coinkidink.
Favorite line from a book:
"Annihilating all that's made/ To a green thought in a green shade." --Andrew Marvell, "The Garden"
Which character you most relate to:
When I read Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, I felt sure I was the hero, Williston Bibb Barret. I wanted to move into the book and stay there. For weeks I did.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Absalom! Absalom! My comprehension of who says what to whom, and when it is said, and what what is said means, I now reckon to have been 2% the first time I read this book. I was 20. Now I am about to crawl in the grave and my comprehension is up to 7%, generously. Yet I am still seduced by this book. How can this happen? The phenomenon of this seductive impenetrability made me want to write a book like it. I was young. And yet I still am sucked into some hallowed, haunted place by this book. I will put down a tractable Faulkner.