Joanna Scott

Joanna Scott is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at The University of Rochester and author of numerous novels and stories, including Everybody Loves Somebody, a collection of stories (Back Bay Books, 2006) and Liberation, a novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Your email reaches me in Italy, at the Villa Santa Maddalena outside Florence, where I'm staying for a couple of weeks. Thanks for your question.

When I'm not writing at a little desk in the garden or battling the tiger mosquitoes or swimming in the pool or walking through the olive groves or enjoying good meals or watching the fireflies flicker through the bamboo, I'm reading Jen Christian Grondahl's illuminating and absorbing novel, Silence in October, which was thrust in my hands by one of his fans here.

In preparation for a class I'm teaching next semester, I'm rereading Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Woolf's The Waves.

And for the rich, engrossing pleasure of it late at night, I'm reading Zola's The Earth.

Scott's other publications include Tourmaline, a novel (Back Bay Books, 2003), Make Believe, a novel (Little, Brown, and Company, 2000), Various Antidotes, a collection of stories (Picador USA, reprint, 2005), Arrogance, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2004), Fading, My Parmacheene Belle (Picador USA, reprint, 2003), The Closest Possible Union, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2003), and The Manikin, a novel (Picador USA, reprint, 2002).

Joanna Scott has received numerous honors for her writing, including Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, the Rosenthal Award from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Lannan fellowship.

--Marshal Zeringue