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| photo: Rubidium Wu | |
Julia Fierro's second novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer (St. Martin's Press, June 6, 2017), was named one of the most anticipated novels of 2017 by the Millions, the Huffington Post and Nylon. Jodi Picoult calls it "a hazy, hot daydream of hidden truth, scandal, and racial prejudice," and Amy Bloom says it's "irresistible storytelling." A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Fierro founded The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop in 2002, now a creative home to more than 4,000 writers, with workshops offered in New York City, Los Angeles and online. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Glamour and other publications, and she has been profiled in the Observer and the Economist. Her first novel was Cutting Teeth.
On your nightstand now:
I'm often reading several books at once--oh, the joy of having piles of books, and the tragedy of not having enough time (in the moment and in a lifetime) to read them all.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: the most remarkable novel I've read this year. I'm not a patient reader, and after the first chapter, I almost gave up. Thank goodness, I bashed on. The experimental structure (told in many epistolary voices) is balanced by a churning emotional urgency that transforms this literary novel into a page-turner.
Smoke by Dan Vyleta: a fabulous genre-bending novel set in an alternative Victorian England where class hierarchy is determined by a person's ability to hide their wicked thoughts which roll of their bodies as visible smoke.
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky: a new novel that is sexy and subversive.
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal: this second novel is funny, poignant and thought-provoking, and follows a fascinating ensemble of Indian American characters outside Cleveland.
Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory: The other day, in Diesel Brentwood, I asked veteran bookseller Anna for her favorite horror reads and left with an armful of books. Raising Stony Mayhall is one of the most original zombie books out there--as touching as it is terrifying.
Favorite book when you were a child:
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths by Ingri d'Aulaire and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire. My tattered copy is a book I'll never part with. I even brought it to college, my teenage version of a security blanket. I waited (somewhat impatiently) for my son to be old enough so I could pass it on, and when he turned nine, he fell in love with the book--perhaps even more ardently than I had as a kid.
Your top five authors:
For me, the most significant authors are those who have inspired me as a writer and as a reader--writers whose novels give me the escape I crave as a reader through thrilling storylines and meticulously imagined worlds, but who also teach me how to craft a compelling story with distinctive characters who have much at stake.
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake, the first book in her MaddAddam series, is one of those books I wish I could reread for the first time. This is literary genre bending at its best, with exquisite prose and a world so fully imagined that it feels real and otherworldly at the same time.
Alice McDermott: I have enjoyed all of McDermott's novels, but it is the slim That Night--set in the Long Island suburbs at the end of the 1960s, just as the nation's disillusionment post-Vietnam War was taking hold--that was a major influence on The Gypsy Moth Summer.
Tana French: When I hear there's a new Tana French book coming out, I feel like a teenager whose favorite band is playing at the local arena. My favorite is the super tense crime thriller Broken Harbour, the fourth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series. It is set in a Dublin real estate development gone bust and focuses on a murdered family who seemed to have an ideal life. French is that rare writer who can spin a story that has you guessing every page up to the big reveal, all while examining the complexity of class.
Sarah Waters: Every Sarah Waters novel is a treasure. The plot of Fingersmith is the most successful example of a twist (and even a twist within a twist!) I've read. And Affinity, set in Victorian London's Millbank prison during the age of "parlor spiritualism," is simply put a perfect novel. Perfect.
Shirley Jackson: I wish Shirley Jackson were still with us and writing. The Haunting of Hill House is a classic story that must be read, but I have read We Have Always Lived in the Castle a dozen times--a spellbinding tale (with a twist) told by an unreliable narrator who readers will never forget. Henry James would've loved this book.
Book you've faked reading:
Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which I started but did not finish for a book club. I feel extra ashamed since my father grew up outside Naples before and during the years Ferrante covers, but the summary style of the prose left me feeling a lack of emotional connection to the characters. I am, however, ready to try Ferrante's many other novels. 
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian--a novel set in a children's hospital that bobs along in a flooded post-apocalyptic world? Check. Did I mention there are angels within the hospital walls--singing, prophesizing, cracking jokes? The Children's Hospital defies category and this is one reason I recommend it to everyone. It's risky, recommending a novel that experiments with structure, story, character, language, even basic reality and sometimes readers don't enjoy my recommendation. But when they do, they love it with total abandon. I have yet to meet Chris Adrian in person but I have several copies of The Children's Hospital ready for him to sign. His short story collection, A Better Angel, is full of the same authentic emotional intensity and is another must-read.
Book you hid from your parents:
One of many Danielle Steel novels I stole from my grandmother's house and then hid under my bed. One in particular stands out in my memory--I can't remember the title but do remember the sex scene that took place underwater in a pool, which was educational to say the least.
Book that changed your life as a reader:
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I wept when I finished it. I must have been 12, an age when great books can shatter and then reassemble your preconceived notions in an instant, so your perspective feels completely altered.
Favorite line from a book:
"Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?" --Affinity by Sarah Waters
Five books you'll never part with:
Moon Palace by Paul Auster: I met my husband, writer Justin Feinstein, in college. I loaned him my copy of Moon Palace for a trip he was taking to Ecuador--the pages covered with my notes and exclamations. He claims those notes made him fall in love. We still have the book 20 years later.
A first edition of Raymond Carver's story collection Cathedral.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky: I was an obsessive underliner and note taker in college, and even more so when I began writing and studying the craft of writing. This is the book whose pages wear the most.
Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: a collection of hundreds of interviews Solomon conducted over a span of 10 years with parents of children who are exceptional. He reveals, with great compassion, families living with deafness, dwarfism, autism, schizophrenia, as well as children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals and who are transgender. This is a life-changing read--one that changes the reader--and makes her or him a better person.
The four books my great uncle Padre Salvatore Fierro wrote about Tramonti, the small town in Southern Italy where my father's family has lived for many generations as farmers, surviving poverty, famine and war. My great-uncle was a Franciscan monk and self-published. I hope to translate them some day.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien. It has a mysterious and thrilling storyline that transforms a literary novel into a page-turner. I read it in one sitting, completely entranced by the mysterious disappearance of a senator's wife soon after the crimes the senator committed in the Vietnam War have surfaced. In fact, I read it almost 10 years ago, and may have just enough time-induced amnesia to read it again.