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| photo: Mayumi Takada | |
Warren Liu is a professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. He is the author of First Contact (Kaya Press, May 26, 2026), a formally experimental and absurdist mock-epic poem that melds speculative fiction and travel writing.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
First Contact is a mock-epic narrative poem that uses conceits from speculative fiction to explore popular tropes of--you guessed it--first contact.
On your nightstand now:
I enjoy assigning myself somewhat arbitrary rule-based reading projects. Right now, I'm trying to read my way through as much of the New York Review Books catalog as I can get my hands on, but only those titles I can borrow from my college library or that I happen to find in a local bookstore, preferably used. So, on my shelf right now:
Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station
Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (translated by Edith Grossman)
Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
Magda Szabó, Iza's Ballad (translated by George Szirtes)
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (translated by Thomas Teal)
Favorite book when you were a child:
So many! But a couple stand out, the first being William Steig's Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Such a delightfully weird and sweet book. I remember being completely terrified by the idea of accidentally wishing oneself into a boulder, immobile and mute but fully conscious. The second would be Richard Adams's Watership Down, because, in addition to the marvelous way the book depicts the inner lives of rabbits, it's also how I first learned that my name is also a noun describing a colony of rabbits.
Your top five authors:
It's hard to name a top five of all time, so instead I'll just list those that I've most recently been obsessed with, and why. László Krasznahorkai, for his propulsive and endless sentences; Aurel Stein, for the sheer romance of late-19th-century archeology as it provides cover for its baser instincts (i.e., looting); Lafcadio Hearn, because he describes Japan in a way that is at once gorgeous and totally wacky; Lorine Niedecker, for her unparalleled mastery of diction, syntax, and lineation in the long poem; and Ursula K. Le Guin, for The Dispossessed.
Book you've faked reading:
So many! I'd say almost anything falling under the category of early American literature. I've certainly faked my way through many classes in which I was ostensibly teaching students about Phyllis Wheatley, for example. I've also definitely never read the entirety of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, even though in the past I've also been tasked with teaching that, which went poorly.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. There is a pierced-by-arrows scene in this novel that is one of the most poignantly hilarious passages I've ever read; more generally, Foster's use of humor as a tool of resistance was a main source of inspiration for First Contact.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most recently, Joe Boyd's And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. It's a cool cover, but the content is cool too.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents were both readers and happy that I was rather nerdish, so I never had to hide anything from them. They did express concern at one point when I was in high school, reading a lot of Raymond Carver and writing stories filled with depressive alcoholics living in suburban melancholy. But I think that might have been more a concern over my aesthetic choices rather than the reading material itself.
Book that changed your life:
It's hard to answer this one because for me it's never an entire book that is impactful, it's usually a passage, theme, or character. If I had to pinpoint only one title, though, it would be Li-Young Lee's debut collection of poetry, Rose, which was the first book that opened my eyes to the idea of Asian American poetry as a definable thing.
Favorite line from a book:
"Italy is just a trap we bumble into if we're stupendously dumb." --from Robert Walser's The Tanners. I've always loved this line even though I no longer remember its context or anything else about the book from which it comes. I think it's the "bumble"/"dumb" rhyme that gets me--all those m's and b's, very delightful.
Five books you'll never part with:
I am not sentimental about books so do not find it hard to let go of them (theoretically). But if you were to rob me of my entire library, leaving me a choice of only five to keep, they would be the ones that have to do with my kids in one way or another:
Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks from A to Z (the apple-shaped one, much loved by my sons)
Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown (with fur cover, of course)
The Goldilocks Variations: A Pop-Up Book by Allan Ahlberg, illustrated by Jessica Ahlberg (a family favorite--we wore this one out!)
Call Me Ishmael by Charles Olson (a signed copy, which my daughter and I found in the $1 bin at our local library)
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (another find while used bookstore browsing with the kids; I'm quite fond of my family, used bookstores, and donkeys, so this was a nice trifecta moment)
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Absalom, Absalom! by Willam Faulkner. What I love about Faulkner is the way his novels continually upend our expectations of narrative time. The experience is one of being constantly displaced; formally, the book itself teaches you how to read it as you go. You get to the end somehow and are amazed that you got there, that it's the end. It's hard to recapture that experience a second time.