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| photo: Beowulf Sheehan | |
Sunil Yapa holds a bachelor's degree in economic geography from Penn State University and an MFA from Hunter College. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China and India, as well as London, Montreal and New York City. His debut novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is published by Lee Boudreaux Books (January 12, 2015).
On your nightstand now:
How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh. On my coffee table: Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World. On the table where I drink my tea: Notes on the Assemblage by Juan Felipe Herrera. On my phone for subway reading and waiting in line at the barbershop: anything by Dennis Lehane. On my desk: The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale.
Favorite book when you were a child:
When I was seven or eight, my favorites were anything by Roald Dahl: Danny, the Champion of the World, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and, in particular, The BFG, not because I remember any of the plot--I don't--but because the giant was so big, and so surprisingly friendly it was a kind of revelation. Also he bottled dreams and blew them gently into people's ears with a trumpet.
When I was 11 or 12, I became paranoid and my favorites were no longer about farts and dreams, they were about telekinesis, covert operations and the all-too-real dangers at home: Firestarter by Stephen King, Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.
Your top five authors:
Michael Ondaatje: He is from Sri Lanka, like my father, and yet his first book was about a jazz player in New Orleans. I felt like that gave me permission to write about whatever I loved. Or hated. Or was confused by.
Don DeLillo: When I am exhausted by language and all books seem devoid of magic--just black letters on white paper--I return to Underworld. Consistently ranked 1 or 2 among the best American novels of the last 100 years, DeLillo's masterpiece narrates across gender, race, class, age and geography to paint one of the most beautiful, compelling and finely crafted portraits of late 20th century America. I don't know if the word for DeLillo's language is "gorgeous" (chiseled?), but I can open this book anywhere and fall into a dream of sound.
Cormac McCarthy: I am less interested in the blood and guts and apocalyptic violence of McCarthy's most famous books, Blood Meridian, The Road, No Country for Old Men, and much more interested in the attention to small kindnesses in the mean world of his border trilogy. People offering lunch, the simple kindness of food, a boy saving a wolf. The second of the trilogy, The Crossing, ends in what is for me one of the most heartbreaking and true scenes in modern literature. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stray dogs in the rain.
Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, most definitely (the yellow butterflies!). Love in a Time of Cholera, sure. But The General in His Labyrinth, wow! This novel about the last seven months of the life of Simón Bolívar, the general who liberated Latin America from Spain, is one of the most powerful novels I've ever read. It helps one to realize the tremendous power of the novel as a tonic for history, that even the great Simón Bolívar is a more complicated man (and at times pathetic, at times sad, at times petty and demanding) than history would have us believe.
William Faulkner: I've never been able to read a Faulkner novel starting from page one. I have to open them in the middle and start from there, and when I reach the end, I just go back around to the beginning and read until where I originally started. Fortunately, with Faulkner, it doesn't seem to matter. Absalom, Absalom! Go Down, Moses. As I Lay Dying. The Sound and the Fury. The granddaddy of multiple narrator novels (all apologies to James Joyce) and stream-of-consciousness (apologies to Virginia Woolf), Faulkner is the modern master that most moves me.
Tina Fey: Bossypants is like a manual for how to be a decent human being in the 21st century. In short, funny, engaging chapters, Tina writes like a rock star who doesn't believe that hype.
Book you've faked reading:
Tolstoy? He wrote some awesome stuff, but I just can't get into the translation--you know?
Book you're an evangelist for:
Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Oh! And Franny and Zooey. Also by J.D. Salinger.
Book that changed your life:
Drown by Junot Díaz. And Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Book that changed how you felt about what novels can do:
Grendel by John Gardner. The most compassionate portrayal of a Danish monster I've ever read. I think this book started my compulsion to root for the bad guy. Or maybe that was the first Die Hard.
Book you hid from your parents:
Stolen copy of the Kama Sutra. It was theirs. Gross!
Novel that you keep shelved among the poetry books because you consult it for the same reasons you consult your poetry books:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Libra by Don DeLillo.
Book that burned the hair from your head:
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.
Favorite line from a book:
"Here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street." --Dancer by Colum McCann
Books that you are reading while hoping for your next project:
M Train by Patti Smith, Hold Still by Sally Mann, El Salvador by Joan Didion and Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog.