Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
James Marcus is a writer, translator, critic, and editor.My reading has been fairly scattered in recent weeks, but I've just finished a galley of Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus: Disptaches From America's Class War, which I admired for its pungent prose and non-dogmatic approach to the train wreck of American politics.
I'm also in the middle of a very amusing novel, Daniel Asa Rose's Flipping For It, which came out in 1987, and have been dipping into The Portable Nabokov, mostly for such scintillating stories as "Cloud, Castle, Lake" and "First Love" (since my hardcover edition of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov is too damn heavy totote around on the subway.)
Oh, and I keep getting drawn into Philip Norman's excellent (if Macca-hating) Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation, because I've had a fanatical run of listening to Beatles bootlegs and would like to write a little book about them.
Next up: Elizabeth McKenzie's new novel MacGregor Tells The World.
In addition to Amazonia, he is the author of five translations from the Italian (the most recent being Tullio Kezich's Dino: The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis and Saul Steinberg's Letters to Aldo Buzzi).He has contributed to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, Newsday, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Book Review, Lingua Franca, The Nation, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications.
Marcus also writes about jazz, pop, and classical music for WBUR Online Arts.
Check out his blog, House of Mirth.
--Marshal Zeringue
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