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| photo: Shelby Demory | |
Jonathan Blum is the author of two books of fiction, both published by Rescue Press: the story collection The Usual Uncertainties (November 1, 2019) and Last Word, a novella, which was named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio and was featured on KCRW's Bookworm with host Michael Silverblatt. Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Los Angeles.
On your nightstand now:
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man, Rachel Cusk's Outline, Yu Hua's To Live, Sabrina Orah Mark's Wild Milk and The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. With this last one, workers went around in the 1930s interviewing people who had been born into slavery and had memories of it. Some of the narratives--like the one in which a girl's parents are given to a young white couple as a wedding gift--are treasures of history, language and storytelling and reminders that slavery is not very far behind us.
Favorite book when you were a child:
When I was a child, my grandmother recited poems to me before I went to sleep. Most of them she knew by heart. My favorites were Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; Poe's "The Bells"; Frost's "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken"; Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!"
Your top five authors:
Raymond Carver, John Cheever, J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, James Baldwin.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Some books I have recommended many times: Heschel's The Sabbath, Michelle Latiolais's Widow. But the book I have recommended more than any other and that I believe everyone should read is The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks, a nonfictional account of the author's high-functioning life with schizophrenia. Saks's struggles with achieving basic sanity will bring you to tears. Her honesty and efforts will move you. I urge this book upon anyone who suffers with mental illness as well as those that are looking for insight into it.
Book you hid from your parents:
I don't remember ever hiding a book from my parents. Maybe I should have hidden more from them.
Book that changed your life:
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I read it at 19, for a postwar American lit class, and I immediately knew that I was going to write stories for the rest of my life.
Favorite line from a book:
In A Room of One's Own, which I recently re-read with much pleasure, Virginia Woolf offers this advisory notice for attention-seeking writers: "Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
Five books you'll never part with:
Here are five books I plan to get old with: Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open, Wislawa Szymborska's Map: Collected and Last Poems, John Berger's Here Is Where We Meet.
Book you want to read again for the first time:
I read Don Quixote when I was 22, and I have never enjoyed reading a book more. Love! Madness! Friendship! Books! I could not possibly enjoy a book that much today. Of course, what could I read that would be the equal of Don Quixote?