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| photo: John Filo | |
Bill Flanagan is author of the novel Fifty in Reverse (Tiller Press/Simon & Schuster, September 1, 2020). His previous novels are A&R, New Bedlam and Evening's Empire. Flanagan is known for his essays on CBS Sunday Morning and for hosting the programs Northern Songs and Flanagan's Wake on Sirius XM Radio. He served as chairman of the PEN Lyric Prize jury, and has written for Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ, the New Yorker, Men's Journal and the New York Times. Flanagan produced and created the TV series VH1 Storytellers and CMT Crossroads.
On your nightstand now:
Apeirogon by Colum McCann is so beautifully written that I stop every 10 pages, go back and re-read them. It's a book you want to stretch out. I have also just come back to Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, one of my favorite contemporary novelists. When it came out, I put it aside and went back and read her other books. Now I am caught up. Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is still by my bed even though I have finished it. I enjoy opening it to random pages.
Favorite book when you were a child:
A collection of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Black Cat" terrified me when I was eight. I could barely stand to look at the title of "The Premature Burial." I got in a big argument with other kids at school about "The Tell-Tale Heart." I kept telling them, "No, he's hearing his OWN heart!"
Your top five authors:
Flannery O'Connor represents a Catholic intellectual tradition that's very funny and not well understood anymore. No one could move you through a character's consciousness like Robert Stone. Brian Moore from Northern Ireland had an amazing range and discipline. E.L. Doctorow slipped complicated ideas into what felt like an effortless technique. Philip Roth had that beautiful, hilarious ruthlessness. An editor said to me once he thought it was because Roth had no children--there was no one in front of whom he was embarrassed.
Book you've faked reading:
Anything required for school. Years later I read Moby-Dick and realized what all the fuss was about.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I am a great fan of The Garden of Eden by Hemingway, a book often dismissed by his devotees. Hemingway worked on it for years, rewriting it over and over and never publishing. It's the story of a young, sexually insecure novelist who writes a book about a macho hunter and is amazed to find that the public assumes he is the character in the book. As the novel moves along, he retreats from the gender confusion and insecurities of his real life to hide behind the character in his fiction. It's the best book I know about the distance between public image and the person behind it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
My wife was on a lot of romance book covers when she was a model. I would bring them home and she would deny it was her.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents were conservative about some things but they did not censor books.
Book that changed your life:
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions came out when I was in high school and showed how joyful writing could be. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe were also teenage favorites. Those books made being a writer look like a fun job.
Favorite line from a book:
From Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote: "Why is it that the hate of a man--even of a man like Franco--dies with his death, and yet love, the love that he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence--for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue?"
Five books you'll never part with:
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, the invention of the New Journalism; The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, the most American story--I will re-create my entire life and get rich and then the girl will go out with me; The Most of S.J Perelman--if I am wobbling under a deadline, I pull Perelman down from the shelf and it makes me want to keep writing; Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus is the best book written by a musician; Monkeys by Susan Minot is a beautiful book about big families.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. A brilliant novel about golden age comic book authors! No one can make high art out of low origins like Chabon.
Great book that was also a great movie:
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The best films usually come out of flawed novels and the best novels often become disappointing films. The Remains of the Day is an exception.