Marshall Jon Fisher’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and other magazines. His essay "Memoria ex Machina" was featured in Best American Essays 2003. He has written several books with his father, David E. Fisher, including Tube: The Invention of Television. His most recent book, now available in paperback, is A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played.Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
In preparation for a writing project that takes place just after World War One, I’ve been reading a lot of books either written then or which take place then. One of the best is the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker. I had already read volume one, Regeneration,Visit Marshall Jon Fisher's website.a couple of years ago, so I just read The Eye in the Door and am now in the middle of The Ghost Road. All three novels feature William Rivers, a real-life psychiatrist who spent the war treating traumatized veterans back in London. His most famous patient-- a main character in the first volume and a secondary one in the others—was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Barker mixes these historical characters with several major fictional ones, mostly other patients of Rivers’s. Funny, brutal, and sexually explicit, these novels brilliantly paint an intimate and unusual portrait of London during the Great War.
--Marshal Zeringue
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