By the Book Read online

  —Francine Prose

  Emily Dickinson. She is such a puzzle. Her startling genius seems to have come from nowhere. She lived her life as a recluse; her work remained essentially unpublished and undiscovered until well after her death. Yet she turned language and poetry on end.

  —Drew Gilpin Faust

  I wish I could have been present when Kafka read The Metamorphosis aloud to his friends, who couldn’t stop laughing. The humor is still there in the text, but I would love to know what he did with his voice.

  —Jonathan Franzen

  Henry James is my idea of the perfect friend. He was a brilliant talker, journalist, traveler, gardener, decorator, correspondent, as well as my favorite writer. He is not primarily an intellectual like Proust or Tolstoy, deeply interested in abstract ideas, but he is much warmer, sensitive, and compassionate.

  —Sylvia Nasar

  Gore Vidal. I admire his range, his passion, and the rate at which he cranked out work. Novels, essays, plays. My process is very, very slow, and I am in awe of writers like Vidal. I’m in awe of writers who write like it’s what they, you know, actually do for a damn living.

  —Dan Savage

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  Joyce Carol Oates

  What book is on your night stand now?

  The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson, edited by Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, and Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, volumes one and two, by Ray Stannard Baker. (Research for my next novel.)

  When and where do you like to read?

  Anywhere! If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room, or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been “put on hold.” Reading material has to be at hand for such desperate emergencies.

  Do you listen to audiobooks? What makes a book worth listening to?

  Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks—but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating. Even for the author, there is the sense of not knowing what will come next, and being drawn along by the actor’s captivating voice.

  What’s the last truly great book you read?

  James Joyce’s Ulysses. In June of this year I reread this ever-astonishing classic with my neuroscientist husband, who had not read it before, in preparation for a trip to Dublin, which overlapped, just barely, with the annual Bloomsday celebration. (And my favorite chapter? “Ithaca.”)

  Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  What engages me is the mysterious, indefinable music of a writer’s voice. I first read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden when I was fifteen years old, and if I’d been told that it was a young man’s autobiographical novel, I would not have been surprised. Proust’s great novel might well be memoir, like virtually all of the first-person fiction of my friend Edmund White, who blurs the line, as it’s said, between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” The sparely, scrupulously crafted early short stories of Ernest Hemingway about the young Nick Adams might well be “nonfiction”—of surpassing beauty. If the reader wants information primarily, of course nonfiction is preferred. But what is executed by way of “information” makes literature, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

  A typical biography relying upon individuals’ notorious memories and the anecdotes they’ve invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered “nonfiction.” My favorite literary genre is, in fact, the “literary novel” (unfortunate term roughly translated as the Kiss of Death). I also enjoy anything noir (often, though not inevitably, set in Los Angeles).

  What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

  Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which my grandmother gave me when I was nine years old and very impressionable. These were surely the books that inspired me to write, and Alice is the protagonist with whom I’ve most identified over the years. Her motto is, like my own, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

  Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s Moby-Dick. This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry. And to balance this all-male adventure, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes?

  Obviously I prefer “paper” books—they are aesthetic objects, usually quite distinct from one another with striking covers and page designs, while electronic books are more or less interchangeable, their words as alike as ants floating in water. As a frequent reviewer, I rely upon bound galleys, in which I take notes. But I do read online, constantly, and on a Kindle if I’m traveling.

  Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  Why either/or? Most good books evoke a variety of responses, not just one. I’ve tried to secret a certain slant of humor (if dark) in virtually all of my writing, but few readers notice—it’s in the mode of Aubrey Beardsley “secreting the obscene” in his drawings. I love being “taught” something worthwhile—but I don’t love being “distracted” to no purpose.

  What were your favorite books as a child?

  Since I grew up on a not-very-prosperous small farm in western New York, north of Buffalo, there were few books in our household, and those that came into my hands were precious—like the Alice books. Probably at too young an age I was reading The Gold-Bug and Other Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe.

  Your most recent book, Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You, is for young adults. Tell us about some of your favorite young adult novels.

  By today’s standards, by which I mean our radically extended sense of what “young adult literature” can be, such classics as Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, The Member of the Wedding, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies are all great YA novels.

  What makes a great YA novel versus a great novel for adults?

  I don’t think that the two are distinct. Literary-minded young people can read virtually anything and understand it to a degree. And it’s said that YA fiction today, given its mature subject matter and relatively uncomplicated language, is often read by adults.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated. My first attempt at reading, for instance, D. H. Lawrence was a disappointment—I wasn’t old enough, or mature enough, quite yet; now, Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, whom I’ve taught in my university courses many times. Another initial disappointment was Walt Whitman, whom I’d also read too young (I know, it’s unbelievable, how could anyone admit to have been “disappointed” in Walt Whitman? Please don’t send contemptuous e-mails).

  If a book I’ve committed myself to review turns out to be “disappointing” I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own. (I don’t think that opinions are very important, in fact. Does it matter that a reader doesn’t “like,” in the trivial way in which one might not “like” Chinese food, a classic like Beowulf?)

  What is your favorite book to use as a teacher to students of writing? What book do you think all writers should read?

  No single text or anthology is a favorite. By this time—since I’ve been teaching at Princeton since 1978—I’ve assembled my favorite short stories and prose
pieces into several anthologies, which I often teach in my fiction workshops. These include The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, and Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?

  We would probably all want to meet Shakespeare—or so we think. (We could ask the man if he’d really written all those plays, or if, somehow, he’d acquired them from—who?—Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, perhaps? Wonder what W. S. would say to that.) Some of us have fantasized meeting Emily Dickinson. (The problem is, would either W. S. or E. D. want to meet us? Why?)

  I’m afraid that I squander as much as 90 percent of my time writing letters—e-mails—to authors, my writer-friends. The problem is that they write back, and so do I. And suddenly the morning has vanished irretrievably, or ineluctably (as Stephen Dedalus would say).

  And I certainly receive many letters, a goodly proportion of them beginning bluntly: “Our teacher has assigned us to write about an American writer and I have chosen you, but I can’t find much information about you. Why do you write? What are your favorite books? Where do you get your ideas? I hope you can answer by Monday because my deadline is…”

  Of the writers you’ve met, who most impressed you?

  I’ve met 1,449 writers so far, and many more await meeting. I’m sure that I’ve been enormously impressed by all of them, especially my dazzlingly talented writer-friends, but the greatest surprises are yet to come, I believe.

  Which of your own books is your favorite?

  No more than we have favorite siblings, friends, or relatives, or will admit to having favorites, does a writer single out his or her “favorite” book. But I can say that the novel that exhausted me the most, wrung my emotions the most, and left me determined never again to write a thousand-page novel with a sympathetic protagonist who must die on the last page is Blonde, imagined as a tragic-epic of the life of Norma Jeane Baker/“Marilyn Monroe.”

  Do you have a least favorite? Or one you regret having written?

  The novel of mine that everyone has hated, or had hated (since it has been out of print virtually since its publication), is The Assassins (1975), which I have not looked at since perhaps 1976. I would never dare reread it—I could accept that it is not a good novel, but I would be very upset to discover that it wasn’t, or anyway, wasn’t “nearly so bad” as everyone said. That would hurt.

  What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

  A work of such brilliant prose, such imaginative powers, such sweep, such flair, with such an irresistible story and riveting characters that simply by reading it attentively one could understand those discoveries of molecular biology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, “philosophy of mind,” and “string theory” in the way that their discoverers/creators understand them.

  What do you plan to read next?

  My in-box, containing sixteen very promising e-mails, most from writer-friends, that have come in since this interview began.

  Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than forty novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Accursed.

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  Library of the Underrated

  Every writer I’m reading and loving seems underappreciated to me—then you mention the name and people say either, “Everyone reads them!” (Charles Portis, Dawn Powell) or, “You’re being willfully obscure!” (Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Anna Kavan). That said, this is a major sport for me—I bore my friends with this all the time—so let’s go: Laurie Colwin. Iain Sinclair. James Tiptree Jr., Stanley Elkin, and Stanley Ellin. And … But I’ll stop.

  —Jonathan Lethem

  At the top would have to be Paul Monette, author of Becoming a Man. He was a superbly gifted writer who died during the AIDS epidemic that deprived us of a generation of talent. I’ve often thought to myself, if they took the graphic sex scenes out of that book, it could be required reading in public schools. But maybe I’m dreaming.

  —James McBride

  I don’t know if he’s unheralded, but there’s a writer named J. Malcolm Garcia who continually astounds me with his energy and empathy. He writes powerful and lyrical nonfiction from Afghanistan, from Buenos Aires, from Mississippi, all of it urgent and provocative. I’ve been following him wherever he goes.

  —Dave Eggers

  For years, I have been heralding the work of Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer. His prose is gorgeous, his approach irreverent, and the ideas in his stories are sometimes comical or fantastical, but always deadly serious—very relevant to understanding the complex history behind multiple holy wars today. In Italy and Spain, his books are best sellers. In the United States, he’s hardly known. Why is there a geographic divide in literary appreciation?

  —Amy Tan

  I don’t know about egregious, but there’s a book I loved called When the Shooting Stops … the Cutting Begins, by Ralph Rosenblum, that any fan of the early Woody Allen would like, and that nobody seems to know about.

  —Ira Glass

  Let’s assume that I’ve overlooked most of the good ones myself, but I’m a fan of Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, by the late Evan S. Connell. It was Connell, and also Jerzy Kosinski (Steps, The Painted Bird) who first made me aware of the power of short, very concise and witty chapters.

  —James Patterson

  Geoffrey Wolff! I asked Vintage to put A Day at the Beach back in print so I could take it with me on book tour in November. I’m a big fan of all of Wolff’s work, but this is the best book of essays I know.

  —Ann Patchett

  I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She’s clever. She does something modern to the sentence. Her race politics (outlined in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road) are a bit over my head, a bit strange, but fascinating.

  —Rachel Kushner

  All writers are underrated.They’re all trying to do their best. It’s hard to finish a book. But Denton Welch deserves more of a fuss. Also John McNulty and that Long-Winded Lady, Maeve Brennan. Shakespeare is probably the most overrated writer of all time, although I must say his sonnets are incredible.

  —Nicholson Baker

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  Nicholson Baker

  What book is on your night stand now?

  The floor next to the bed is my true night stand. On it is a heap of books—things like John Masters’s Bhowani Junction, Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds on Nantucket, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, and Lederer and Burdick’s The Ugly American. Some books have been there a very long time. I reach down without looking and grab something and read a little of it, and then I put it back in the heap.

  Last night my hand landed on John Toland’s Infamy, about Pearl Harbor, and I read fifty pages—it’s tremendous in a certain way. All books are incomplete. In my briefcase, which is perhaps my true, true night stand, I’ve been carrying around the galleys of Katie Roiphe’s In Praise of Messy Lives. Roiphe’s willing to say risky things, and she has a prosey astringency that makes me happy.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Recently I listened to Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, read by Tim Pigott-Smith. It’s a little repetitive here and there, especially at the beginning, but honestly, it’s an extraordinary, careful novel that works up to something true and sad and worth spending time with. I also liked Greene’s autobiography, A Sort of Life.

  What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about twenty Dick Francis novels. I also sometimes like reading romance novels by people like Sylvia Day—not ones about vampires or werewolves or shape-shifters. When I really want
to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. I go back to the poetry collections I read in my twenties—Stanley Kunitz’s Collected Poems, Howard Moss’s Selected Poems. Also I love reading diaries. Recently I’ve been reading diaries by May Sarton and Thomas Merton.

  What was the last book that made you cry?

  I cried reading Mary Berg’s diary of hunger in the ghetto in Warsaw. More recently and trivially, I cried when I read through my own book of essays and realized: thank God, it’s done.

  The last book that made you laugh?

  Well, I’ve got Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad on Eucalyptus, a nice simple app for the iPhone. The animated page-turns are better than the page-turns in iBooks! Twain’s a genius, no question. Read his “War Prayer,” too. It isn’t funny—it’ll make you mad.

  Which novels contain the best sex?

  Sometimes I think there are no good sex novels. When you’re not in the mood, there’s nothing worse than a sex scene. Words fail. Although I have liked listening to Fanny Hill. You can hear a marvelous free audio rendition of Fanny Hill on LibriVox.org. All the different readers, male and female, with their different accents, enhance the experience.

  What’s the best book about Maine?

  E. B. White’s essays are the best things I’ve read about Maine—especially the one in which he’s not sure if he can go out sailing anymore in his sloop.

  Which writers are egregiously overlooked or underrated?

  All writers are underrated. They’re all trying to do their best. It’s hard to finish a book. But Denton Welch deserves more of a fuss. Also John McNulty and that Long-Winded Lady, Maeve Brennan. Shakespeare is probably the most overrated writer of all time, although I must say his sonnets are incredible.