Swedish author Lina Wolff has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her story collection Många människor dör som du (Many People Die Like You), published by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2009. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, translated by Frank Perry and published in trade paperback by And Other Stories on January 12, 2016, is her first novel to appear in English. It's received Sweden's Vi Magazine Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year.
On your nightstand now:
I am re-reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. First time was 20 years ago, and then I loved it. I thought it was the perfect book. Perhaps that is why I started to re-read it--I wanted to go back to that feeling. And, well, I am not disappointed, but something has changed between the book and me during these years. I have to make an effort to accept that everything is polished and symmetrical in his prose, and that there is very little space for the readers' own interpretations.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Bluebeard by Charles Perrault. The book was a gift from my grandmother, who used to say that it was good for children to be frightened by sagas, because then they wouldn't have the energy to be frightened by reality which, according to her, was much worse when it came to fear. I don't know if she was right: the serial killer and his bleeding key surely scared me, but the reading spellbound me more.
Your top five authors:
I have a general crush on South American writers, whom I admire a lot. Roberto Bolaño, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Laura Restrepo, Cortázar, Borges, just to mention some. Many of them explore the possibilities of fiction in a very liberating way. I newly read a book by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, and I love the way she so effortlessly creates the universe of her novel, and how she sticks to it all throughout the book, which is just one long marvelous and scary chapter. Mexican writer Juan Rulfo opened my eyes to the Spanish language when I lived in Spain. I think his short novel Pedro Páramo is the kind of book you need to read from time to time as a writer, in order to sweep your brain free from unnecessary words. There is something like a silence around every word in his books. That is perhaps why you hear each one more clearly. It sounds odd, but that is exactly how I feel when I read him, as if my ears were cleaned and the world easier to perceive.
Book you've faked reading:
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I feel really unhappy about this, since many people I appreciate and admire love this book. I am incapable of getting through it, even though I have tried several times. Perhaps I expect something like Orlando from her, which is one of my favorite books. I think the idea of a protagonist living for 400 years and changing sex is wonderful, and the language is wonderful too. The whole book is like a dance. 
Book you're an evangelist for:
Haha! I become an evangelist for everything I read and like!
Book you've bought for the cover:
I haven't bought any book for the cover, but I have bought books for being thin. And sometimes I have been lucky--like with Catalan writer Elia Barceló's hilarious El secreto del orfebre [The Goldsmith's Secret], a 90-page novel about love, or rather its impossibility.
Book you hid from your parents:
I must have hid Bluebeard from them. I think my grandmother told me to do so....
Book that changed your life:
I think every book that I like a lot has changed my life in some way or another. I believe that when we read books that touch us deeply, we change direction with them. It's like a new light is thrown over our lives and we can perceive things in a different way. I think that the books one spends real time with, like the Russian big novels or the books one re-reads over and over again, change our own inner monologues, the general flow of our thoughts. When I read Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, for example, I began to think in a much more metaphorical way, and I really liked it.
Favorite line from a book:
Talking about Djuna Barnes, I like this line from Nightwood: "I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say 'Love' and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Rather than reading them again for the first time, I would like to have my "reader's innocence" back occasionally. Just for a while. When you write and read a lot, you learn to scan a book quite quickly and you also learn what it takes for a book to seduce you. And the more good stuff you read, the more exigent you become. But you also lose a kind of naiveté, and I can miss that. Sometimes I wish I could just grab an exciting book and love it without thinking, but I know that is impossible, especially if the language is not good. There has to be a concern for the expression, and apart from that, also something deeper, something that makes me reflect and see things differently.
