Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. His new book is Love Begins in Winter.Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
Lately I have been reading about everything from fashion to Proust, metaphysical investigation to new children's tales. For me, one of the pleasures of reading is pulling from a variety of sources to amalgamate an image of the world and our consciousness of it. Books are ingredients in a recipe that ultimately helps to make up our minds over the course of years of reading. For instance, I have been reading Walt Whitman, whose expansive elegies constitute vast feasts of American life to me.Visit Simon Van Booy's website.And Guy de Maupaussant, whose delectable stories taste of bitter irony, and are served with such simplicity that I savor them like nice Port. Also, the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose grasp of the utter futility of life is somehow comforting, and his wit is like a balm to the soul, not to mention the repugnance of some of his ideas. My agent recently gave me a galley of a book due out this fall, called Persian Porn and Iranian Rappers, which I am really enjoying. It's the memoir of a young Englishman who travels around Iran and learns how incredible the country and its people truly are. Beyond that, I plan on reading some serious essays on composting.
--Marshal Zeringue
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