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Sam Lansky is an essayist, journalist and cultural critic. He has written for New York magazine, the Atlantic and Esquire, among others, and is now West Coast editor at Time. His memoir, The Gilded Razor, was published in 2016. His debut novel, Broken People (just released by Hanover Square Press), is about a young man who meets a mysterious shaman who promises to transform him in three days.
On your nightstand now:
Next up on my queue is The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne, which was highly recommended by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has terrific taste in books. My confession is that I haven't started it yet.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I still have a hardcover copy of E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan on my shelf--I remember loving it so fiercely as a kid, as a celebration of what makes us different, even if that difference is something the world frames as a shortcoming. Years later, I feel like I'm still exploring those ideas in my own work. (Both off the page and, uh, in therapy.)
Your top five authors:
Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, James Baldwin, Fran Lebowitz, Mary Karr.
Book you've faked reading:
Too many to count? I'm terrible at keeping up with the big, zeitgeist-defining fiction of the moment, and I'm usually too much of a coward to admit it, but I'll nod and smile when those books come up in conversation, hoping nobody catches me in the lie of omission.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I talk, probably too much, about Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story, which is my favorite book on writing, period, though it's of particular use to writers of personal narrative. It was crucial for me when I was writing my memoir, but even as I've expanded into fiction, I've found myself returning to it: Gornick outlines so clearly the traps writers of memoir and essay repeatedly fall into, and how best to swerve them.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Well before the pandemic made it seem startlingly prescient, I bought Ling Ma's Severance from Posman Books in Atlanta; the cover design was so distinctive that it grabbed me without knowing anything about the book. Now, of course, I'm haunted by it--and worried that if I reread it, I'll never sleep again.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents are both voracious readers with relatively highbrow taste; I think my greatest shame as a young person was the sheer volume of Gossip Girl novels I read while I was in school and should have been reading the classics. (Years later, Janet Malcolm's wonderful essay about the merits of those books for the New Yorker validated my dubious taste.)
Book that changed your life:
Here, again, I fear there are too many to count--why read if it's not going to change your life?--but I have a specific memory of reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection of magazine articles, Pulphead, and being just staggered by the fact that journalism could do that. His writing is so detailed, so personal and so perceptive; I think he's one of the modern masters.
Favorite line from a book:
When I was writing Broken People, I returned many times to an essay by Mary Gaitskill titled "Lost Cat," published in Granta in 2009 and reprinted in her 2017 collection Somebody with a Little Hammer. The line that I kept circling over and over again was this: "If you can't see inside the heart no matter how you look, then why not look?" It's a deeply self-interrogating piece, and this line reminds me that the pursuit of greater self-knowledge is its own worthy thing, regardless of what you find.
Five books you'll never part with:
Frank Conroy's Stop-Time
Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life
Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man
Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story is, I think, the most piercing book ever written about addiction; the way the book opens, with an intensely detailed list of the circumstances under which Knapp drank, is so elegant and gripping and propulsive. Every time I read it, I'm reminded of her greatness--and how desperately I wish she'd had the chance to write more books before her passing--but I would love to experience the thrill of reading that first page again for the first time, and the pleasure of recognizing yourself in another writer's words.