V.S. Alexander, who also writes under the name Michael Meeske, is a student of history with a strong interest in music and the visual arts. His novel The Magdalen Girls (Kensington, December 27, 2016) tells the story of three young women banished by their families to the harsh life of servitude and abuse at a Magdalen laundry in 1962 Dublin. Alexander lives in Florida and is at work on a second historical novel.
On your nightstand now:
My nightstand happens to be an old wicker laundry basket that I'm too sentimental to part with. On it are The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, because every writer should read them; The Exile Breed by Charles Egan and Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, both relating to my current work in progress (and the Shakespeare has an 1894 Vermont school library bookplate pasted on the inside cover); and finally, The Bedside Companion to Sherlock Holmes by Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, because it's fun.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Easy. A 1957 copy of David and the Phoenix by Edward Ormondroyd purchased through the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club. I rarely touch it now because I'm afraid it will crumble in my hands. The cover is nicked and the pages are continuing their inexorable trudge to rusty brown oblivion. This book introduced me to the worlds of words and fantasy. It's a meditation on death and rebirth that has never left me.
Your top five authors:
I don't like to rank working authors because there are so many excellent ones writing today. The list would be too long and I also don't want to slight anyone. However, there are many authors who have influenced my work, the most significant being Edgar Allan Poe. Others include Oscar Wilde, Shirley Jackson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gustave Flaubert and Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë, those spirited geniuses from Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Book you've faked reading:
Oh, I hate to say this for fear of being slapped, but I believe every writer has one classic they couldn't get through. Mine was Moby-Dick. I had to read it for an American Literature class in college. CliffsNotes on that one. I should pick it up again and see what happens.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I love to discover and promote books that have disappeared, or somehow fly under the radar. One of my favorite discovered reads is Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker. This lovely coming-of-age novel is set in the wheat country of central Montana in the 1940s. The reader cannot help but get caught up in the heroine's time and place thanks to Walker's vivid, flinty prose. It's a stunning novel that will live with you long after the last page is read.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Covers can catch the eye but it's the writing that captures my interest. However, Irène Némirovsky's World War II novel Suite Française, with its striking cover photo by Roger-Viollet, of two young lovers in war-torn France, perfectly captures the mood.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Harrad Experiment (1973) by Robert H. Rimmer. Hot stuff, then. Under-the-covers-with-the-flashlight kind of reading.
Book that changed your life:
Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, a Scholastic Library edition from 1960, with an introduction by Groff Conklin. To this day, that greenish-yellow, pre-psychedelic portrait of Poe on the cover looks out at me with sinister fascination. Every tale inside was a revelation, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to "Metzengerstein."
Favorite line from a book:
From Madame Bovary by Flaubert, the Modern Library Edition:
"Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
Achingly beautiful.
Five books you'll never part with:
Please don't make me give up all of my books except for five! I'll keep my Yorkshire novels and add these:
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Any edition of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The Assassins by Joyce Carol Oates
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Who wouldn't want to discover this novel for the first time?
Fiction you read while researching your latest book:
Because The Magdalen Girls was set in 1962 Dublin, I read as much nonfiction material as I could get my hands on, but also several novels I felt would add realism to my work. The Magdalen by Marita Conlon-McKenna, the story of how a girl came to be "incarcerated" in a Magdalen laundry and her experiences there. The Magdalen Martyrs by Ken Bruen, a disturbing, fascinating novel that weaves the Magdalens into Bruen's wonderful detective series. For a lesson in Irish dialect, I read Brendan O'Carroll's funny and touching The Mammy.