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Lee Boudreaux is v-p and editorial director of Lee Boudreaux Books, an imprint of Little, Brown founded in 2014. During her career, she has published a diverse list of titles, including Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Smith Henderson's Fourth of July Creek, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep and David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. She focuses primarily on fiction, and her inaugural 2016 list for Little, Brown began with Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa and will conclude with Mischling by Affinity Konar, both debut novels. The mission of the imprint is to publish books featuring unusual stories, unexpected voices and an immersive sense of place.
On your nightstand now:
Helen Ellis's American Housewife and Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women have just taken up residence, while Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas have been sitting there, singing their siren songs, longer than I care to admit. There's also a story collection called If I'd Known You Were Coming by Kate Milliken, Volt by Alan Heathcock, Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You and The David Foster Wallace Reader (because we've all got to start somewhere), along with Dark Money by Jane Mayer, Children of the Flames by Lucette Lagnado and The Glorious Nosebleed by Edward Gorey, which I just picked up today with my seven-year-old. There's clearly no room for a lamp on this very aspirational nightstand!
Favorite book when you were a child:
Oh, there were so many! Greek and Roman mythology, The Chronicles of Narnia (pure obsession!), the 20 fabulous adventures in The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley, as well as The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald (madcap tales about an ingenious con-artist kid in Salt Lake City in the late 1800s. The only other person I've ever heard mention these books is my boss. Clearly, she sensed our shared interest in fictional frontier Utah). I adored Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (vermicious knids!) by Roald Dahl, Kipling's The Jungle Book and anything by Edgar Allan Poe. The original, unedited version of The Bad Island by William Steig is a masterpiece! To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was in a category unto itself, of course. Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn made a sizable impression. One of the most indelible stories of my childhood was told to me, not read. When I was seven or eight, my great-aunt, a retired university librarian, had me in thrall with the gruesome tale of a woman who couldn't get the blood off her hands no matter how many times she washed them. A decade later, sitting in English class, I suddenly realized she'd been telling me the story of Macbeth. You gotta love a librarian.
Your top five authors:
How does anyone answer this question??! I feel like it's impossible. If you'd asked me when I was 20, I would have said Hemingway, Steinbeck, Waugh, Trollope, Woolf, Wolfe and Welty (those last three sound like a law firm). Of recent vintage, I'm going to say Annie Proulx, Kate Atkinson, Richard Price, Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Kate Walbert, Ann Patchett and Gary Shteyngart. Wait a minute--P.G. Wodehouse needs to be in this answer somewhere! And after rereading books with my daughter, Roald Dahl and E.B. White absolutely must be on the list.
(Clearly, I have difficulty counting to five.)
Book you've faked reading:
I'm only too happy to admit my ignorance when it comes to all the things I should have read by now and haven't! But when I first moved to New York, I felt obliged to nod knowingly through more than a few numbing conversations about The Master and Margarita. And I've never faked it, but I feel that never having read Little Women is a real stain on my character.
Book you're an evangelist for:
An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray, which was his first novel, preceding Skippy Dies.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The hardcover of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. But, truth be told, I didn't buy it. I worked at Random House when it was published and there was a gigantic book room in the basement of the old building where all of us, even the lowliest assistant, could go and get a copy (or multiple copies!) of any book they'd recently published. You could walk out of there with a stack you literally couldn't see over, and no one would say a peep to you. I used to spend hours down there, collecting lavish Fodor guidebooks to cities I couldn't afford to visit, Everyman's Library classics, Clarkson Potter books on how to trompe l'oeil and apply faux finishes (no, I never once put these to use), and hardcovers I just liked the look of. I don't know what my poor boss thought I was doing all that time; I must have convinced her I was a very methodical Xerox-er.
Book you hid from your parents:
I think I was just out of college when Nicholson Baker's Vox was published, but I'm pretty sure I hid it when my mother came to visit. As an 11-year old, I didn't necessarily hide Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret but I would have died a thousand deaths if my older brother had caught me reading it.
Book that changed your life:
Lolita, but not for the reason most people cite. It was my first exposure to an unreliable narrator and I was... shocked. If you can't trust a book, for Pete's sake, what is there to believe in?!?! I hope I've since developed a slightly more nuanced appreciation of it but, in 10th grade, it rattled me to the core. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff blew my mind. I remember reading them and thinking, "Man, I didn't know you could do this on paper!" (You may have intuited by now that I think very highly of his exuberance in punctuating.) And Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston likewise upended the notion of what a voice on the page could or should sound like.
(Clearly, I also have trouble counting to one.)
Favorite line from a book:
"But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city." --Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
"We don't sell pigs." -- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Five books you'll never part with:
A signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that my mother finagled from an old college friend of hers who'd known Harper Lee since childhood and still played golf with her. The beautiful old second-hand hardcovers of Peter Matthiessen's books I laid hold of when I was an editorial assistant lucky enough to briefly find myself in his orbit. My mother's marked-up copies of her Julia Child cookbooks. A coffee-table book of Charles Addams cartoons (booty from that Random House book room, again).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
All of them.